The Castle of Whispers
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This Goncourt Lyceens Award–winning novel is “a powerfully visualized magic-realist fable” of secrets, faith, and female defiance in twelfth century France (Kirkus Reviews).
France, 1187. On the day of her wedding, the beautiful fifteen-year-old Esclarmonde scandalizes the court when she refuses to marry the knight chosen by her father, the brutish lord of the domain of Whispers. Defying her father’s wishes, she vows to give herself to God. To punish her willfulness, her father imprisons her in a cell adjoining the castle’s chapel.
Instead of the peaceful solitude she sought, Esclarmonde finds in her cell the crossroads between the living and the dead. Walled in, with nothing but a single barred window connecting her to the outside world, Esclarmonde exerts a mysterious power over the kingdom. The virgin sorceress reaches a saint-like status, and men and women journey from far and wide to hear her speak. When even her own father falls under her sway, Esclarmonde persuades him to undertake an ill-fated war in the Holy Land.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her second novel, Martinez (The Threads of the Heart) illuminates a poetic, enigmatic and exhilarating tale, challenging the boundaries between reality and mystery; between society and gender; and between choice and fate. The year is 1187. After outraging the court by refusing her betrothed on her wedding day, the beautiful and brave 15-year-old Esclarmonde resolves to live "confined until her death little sealed cell" attached to a chapel on a cliff. Locked in the darkness of her tomb forevermore, she discovers a "crossroads where the living and the dead meet" and she begins her life as the Virgin of Whispers, the mystical imprisoned damsel who speaks from the Castle of Whispers. Destined for solitude, Esclarmonde, who unbeknownst to the kingdom is pregnant, gives birth to a son, who, like his mother, becomes renowned across the land. The destiny of anchoress in the castle is further complicated as she, with the help of her prophetic son, begins to advise her father to wage war on the holy land. Through mystical and miraculous turns, Martinez engrosses readers into a story of transcendence, redemption and survival.
