ANCHORESS OF SHERE

Anchoress of Shere
by Paul Moorcraft
Publication Date: April 2002
Poisoned Pen Press
ISBN: 1-59058-011-7
Hardcover $24.95
320 pages

Have you ever been held as a captive by a book?

The title did not interest me at all but I had agreed to read the book. I’m still recovering from not being able to put it down. The book was literally attached to my eyes and I could not be parted from it. (Yes, it does have a little explicit sex so caution does need to be taken.)

To explain the book you need to know what an anchoress/anchorite was. These were people that lived during the medieval time period of the 1300s that agreed to be walled up inside a church for their spiritual growth. For some strange reason this did not continue into the European Renaissance.

The person of Christine Carpenter did really exist and she was an anchoress for a few years. After escaping from her self-imposed wall-in prison, there was quite a church controversy as to how she could redeem her position with the church. Parts of her walled-in cell do actually exist today in the church in Shere, England. However, legend has filled in many of the gaps of her life story which in this book is a priest that is obsessed with her life.

With being a story within a story, I expected this to be confusing and was delighted to find such a clear, flowing plot development throughout. The characters were so vivid that I actually felt that I could recognize these people if I ever had the opportunity to meet them.

Apparently this book has already been printed in England and is the basis for a play as well as a BBC movie. This first time book author rewrote this story for an American audience but had difficulty finding a publisher so he went to a small press for publication.

Don’t let the bookstores tell you what to read, read this if you don’t read anything else all year. You’ll remember it long after you read it.