A dark and beautifully crafted historical novel by an award-winning author. It is 1535 and Agnes Peppin, daughter of a West-country butcher, has been banished from her family home in disgrace to live out the rest of her life cloistered behind the walls of Shaftesbury Abbey. While Agnes grapples with the complex rules and hierarchies of the sisterhood, King Henry VIII has proclaimed himself Head of the Church of England. Religious houses are being formally subjugated, monasteries dissolved, and the great Abbey is no exception to the purge. Cast out with her sisters, Agnes is at last free to be the master of her own fate. But freedom comes at a price as she descends into a world she knows little about, using her wits and testing her moral convictions against her need to survive - by any means necessary... AUTHOR: Victoria Glendinning is a British biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist. Born in Sheffield and educated at Oxford, she is an Honorary Vice-President of English PEN, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was appointed a CBE, is the twice winner of the Whitbread Biography award and Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature.