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The Corner That Held Them

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What to expect

A unique novel about life in a fourteenth-century convent by one of England’s most original authors

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of events that, in time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel, set in the era of the Black Death, about a Benedictine convent of no great note. The nuns do their chores, seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their house and chapel, and struggle with each other and with themselves. The book that emerges is a picture of a world run by women but also a story—stirring, disturbing, witty, utterly entrancing—of a community.

What is the life of a community and how does it support, or constrain, a real humanity? How do we live through it and it through us? These are among the deep questions that lie behind this rare triumph of the novelist’s art.

Critics Review

“One of the great British novels of the twentieth century: a narrative of extraordinary reach, power, and beauty.”

Sarah Waters, New York Times bestselling author

“Warner’s style is delicate and arch…Though she teeters on the edge of satire, she lands instead…on poignancy.”

New York Times
Author Sylvia Townsend Warner
Narrator Emma Gregory
Duration 14 hours and 38 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9798200923540
Format Audiobook
Publisher Blackstone Publishing
Genre Fiction: general and literary, Historical fiction, Religious and spiritual fiction
Availability US

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