But for my tuppence-worth, and amongst many other things, I feel it is a valuable glimpse into the psychology of religious belief.

We can see how her ostentatious holiness serves her in a patriarchal society, allowing her to do otherwise forbidden things like neglecting her children and refusing to have sex with her husband. The anchorite continued to explain that a double-minded person in the soul is always unstable and unsteady in all their ways.

When she herself falls ill with a fever, she experiences 16 “shewings”, or visions, and is persuaded to retreat from the world. She was shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize, as well as being awarded prestigious writing residencies in Scotland, Finland and Australia.

I loved spending time with the wise, compassionate Julian and the difficult, dramatic, boastful and courageous Margery through this book as through their own writings. Initially, Julian only had her “shewings”; once she became an anchoress she worked and reworked her understanding of them. Here you might be saying to yourself well, here's the medievalist being grouchy and nitpicky, and on a certain level you're not wrong. Following His command, she revealed the grace that God had infused into her soul, including compunction, contrition, sweetness, and devotion, along with compassion through holy meditation and high contemplation.Butler-Bowdon threatened to throw it on the bonfire, saying “then we may be able to find ping pong balls and bats when we want them”. In the early sections, I struggled to tell Julian and Margery’s voices apart, but as the novel unfolds, Mackenzie establishes their distinctive characters and their very different attitudes to their holy visions. Seeing its length means I can pop it into Novellas in November if I spot a copy between now and then!