I did enjoy the book and the different relationships between the women and how they have all handled their entry into the convent – or not, as the case may be.

As disorder and rebellion mount, it is the abbess’s job to keep the convent stable while, outside its walls, the dictates of the Counter-Reformation begin to purge the Catholic Church and impose on the nunneries a regime of terrible oppression.Ī story of love, the imprisonment of women in convents when society gives them no alternative, powerplays between women in enclosed worlds where there is little to no immediate contact with the outside world (and the little contact would be taken away soon after this book finishes). Thus begins a complex relationship of trust and betrayal between the young rebel and the clever, scholarly nun, for whom the girl becomes the daughter she will never have.Īs Serafina rails against her incarceration, others are drawn into the drama: the ancient, mysterious Suora Magdalena–with her history of visions and ecstasies–locked in her cell the ferociously devout novice mistress Suora Umiliana, who comes to see in the postulant a way to extend her influence and, watching it all, the abbess, Madonna Chiara, a woman as fluent in politics as she is in prayer. Her first night inside the walls is spent in an incandescent rage so violent that the dispensary mistress, Suora Zuana, is dispatched to the girl’s cell to sedate her. Ripped by her family from an illicit love affair, sixteen-year-old Serafina is willful, emotional, sharp, and defiant–young enough to have a life to look forward to and old enough to know when that life is being cut short. And the arrival of Santa Caterina’s new novice sets in motion a chain of events that will shake the convent to its core. But any community, however smoothly run, suffers tremors when it takes in someone by force.

The year is 1570, and in the convent of Santa Caterina, in the Italian city of Ferrara, noblewomen find space to pursue their lives under God’s protection.

Sacred hearts by sarah dunant