Obedience - Jacqueline Yallop

Sister Bernard has lived in a grey-stone convent in rural France for more than seventy years. In that time, a once youthful and lively cloister has gradually emptied, until only Bernard and two other nuns remain. Now, the three women pack away their few possessions into wooden boxes, preparing to leave the building that has been their home for decades. For the nuns, the closing of the convent means more than losing a home; the walls have shielded them from a changing modern world, for Sister Bernard the quiet monotony of the religious life has protected her from memories of the past - the disgrace of when she was a young woman in wartime France; when her devotion to God faded in the face of her need for a young Nazi soldier; and when she experienced the full horror and violence of war.

Jacqueline Yallop read English at Oxford and did her PhD in nineteenth-century literature at the University of Sheffield. She has worked as the curator of the Ruskin Collection in Sheffield and is the author of the non-fiction work Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves and the novel Kissing Alice. She currently lives in France.

An intensely imagined novel about one of the defining questions of the century just past: where and how we choose to draw the line between innocence and guilt, ignorance and complicity. Obedience also asks us to consider what ghastly harm is committed in the name of love. It's rare to find a book that is seemingly so simple, but is really ambiguous and thought-provoking.
Hilary Mantel

By far the most impressive novel I read this year... I'd give it to anyone who wants, as I do, to have their head and heart churned by what they read
Observer - Julie Myerson

A spellbinding tale of betrayal and illicit desire... The human experience of love, desire, guilt and loneliness are at the heart of the novel... A compelling and quietly devastating story about a woman destroyed by her faith
Independent on Sunday

A wise, mysterious, gravely compelling story about a young nun in occupied France and the long sad aftermath of a wartime love affair... A novel of huge scope and profound questioning
Sunday Times

A work of great originality, devastating in its impact... As powerful as it is subtle, a novel of gripping emotional and psychological intensity
Daily Mail