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THE EXQUISITE PHILOSOPHOCAL FABLE, SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE

'This remarkable novel resembles an illuminated manuscript mapped with angels and mountains and signposts, an allegory for today and yesterday too. A beautiful, unsettling moral fiction about virtue and intolerance' Observer

At opposite ends of Grandinsula, a remote pre-reformation Christian island, shepherds find a creature with strange footprints stealing their lambs, and fishermen find a swimmer near exhaustion struggling towards the shore.

The child cannot stand, eat or speak like a human being; the swimmer says he is a prince in the unheard of land of Aclar, and declares himself to be an atheist.

Severo, Cardinal-Prince of the island, is confronted by a double conundrum. Could an atheist be received in good faith? Not if the knowledge of God is inborn and he has reneged it. If he is a renegade from the truth, he must be burned as a heretic; but Severo would dearly like to save him.

And what of the feral child, abandoned by her mother and suckled by wolves, who knows nothing of the precarious relationship between Church and State? Does she, in fact, have a soul to save?

Her innocence will become the subject of a dangerous experiment, a philosophical game of chess that soon turns into a matter of life and death...

'A compelling medieval fable, written from the heart and melded to a driving narrative which never once loses its tremendous pace' Guardian

'Remarkable...Utterly absorbing...richly detailed and finely imagined' Sunday Telegraph

(Shortlisted Booker Prize 1994)