IT’S THE ninth century, and Agnes is the motherless child of an English priest living in Mainz. The nine-year-old knows that she is named after a child saint who was burned at the stake and stabbed in the throat for refusing the men who wanted to lie on her. She wonders whether it would have been better for Agnes to let the men lie on her and still be alive.

Her wonderings give a disturbing sense of a child who knows both too much and too little. Her material needs are met, and her life is not without love, but no one seeks to understand her, and there is a notable absence of women. She sits under the table and listens to her father and other important men discuss church politics, but it is through her experience of the natural world that she discovers a deep and wide relationship with God.

An accident frees Agnes from an arranged marriage and marks the start of an epic journey, in which Agnes, disguised as a man, finds her freedom. “John” becomes a brilliant academic, teacher, and communicator, and eventually the most powerful person in Rome. Over the years, she realises that the God whom she discovered in the forest and the God of the Christian faith are the same, and she slowly finds belonging through Christian community.

“Singing the offices, she notices hers is no longer one voice straining to meet the others but a drop of water in a mighty sea. She is nothing and immense all at once. . . she is exactly where she should be and He, as always, is there too”.

Rapture is a restless, disturbing, brilliant novel about the search for faith and identity. Agnes bursts out of the constricted role set for her as a ninth-century woman and travels via decades of loneliness to a place of both freedom and belonging.

The Ven. Catherine Pickford is the Archdeacon of Northolt, in the diocese of London.

Rapture
Emily Maguire
Sceptre £16.99
(978-1-3997-3106-5)
Church Times Bookshop £15.29