What does it take for a woman to be judged saintly? In this wily, wonderfully original novel, Michle Roberts tells the story of the fictional Saint Josephine: her life and death, her childhood and evolution from woman to nun to abbess, her unlikely canonization. The more we discover, the more incredible her sainthood seems. Who was Saint Josephine? Craven nun or fearless miracle worker? Pious role model or seductress? Illuminating Saint Josephine's story are the equally fantastical stories of eleven actual female saints: mad one-armed girls, beauties locked in towers, mothers who encourage their daughters' fatal anorexia, ingenues who seduce and dismember their fathers. Together the stories expose the historical conflict between female sexuality and religion, the roots of female roles in the church, and the troubled love between fathers and daughters. In original exploration of love, faith, and desire, Impossible Saints is a funny, disturbing, and utterly compelling novel about modern women who came before their time.

Impossible Saints (Harvest Book)

Literature & Fiction

Roberts, Michèle

United States

Mariner Books

The power of Colette's work comes from its modernist storytelling. Colette was a pioneering, ground-breaking modernist writer, but has not always had her originality and worth recognized in Britain. Her work provocatively uses unstable narratives, gaps, silences, fairytale, mythical tropes, and sensual evocations of childhood, sex, and landscapes. In this book, Michèle Roberts examines how Colette invents new forms to express her unsettling content on desire, perversion, ageing, and different forms of love. Delving into four keys texts, Roberts explores Colette's willingness to break open taboos about older woman and desire, as well as hidden and forbidden aspects of human longings and pleasures. Through these re-readings, Roberts discovers that Colette's work is even more entrancing, more disturbing, and more original than she first thought.

Colette: My Literary Mother (My Reading)

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

"A dazzling, unputdownable read...a deeply compelling narrative of dark secrets and intrigue." -- Scotland on Sunday

Fair Exchange: A Novel

British & Irish

Picador

A Booker Prize Finalist, Daughters of the House is MichÃ¨le Robertsâ€™s acclaimed novel of secrets and lies revealed in the aftermath of World War II. ThÃ©rÃ¨se and LÃ©onie, French and English cousins of the same age, grow up together in Normandy. Intrigued by parentsâ€™ and servantsâ€™ guilty silences and the broken shrine they find in the woods, the girls weave their own elaborate fantasies, unwittingly revealing the village secret and a deep shame that will haunt them in their adult lives.

Daughters of the House: A Novel

The Looking Glass: A Novel

An orphan enchanted by stories and the incantatory power of words, Genevieve lives an isolated existence as a maid to the widow Patin in a village cafe on the Normandy coast in the early 20th century. Forced to flee the village, she comes under the spell of a charismatic spinner of words, a poet who captivates every woman around him -- his mother, his mistress, his niece, his niece's governess, and eventually, his new maid, who soon begins to spin a story of her own.

Sisters Catherine and Vinny are writers living in London with secrets to guard: Catherine publishes erotic novels unbeknownst to her husband, while Vinny defaces the homes of women authors. When tragedy strikes, however, both women face their betrayals with new perspective. Acclaimed author Michèle Roberts brings history to life-threaded into this contemporary narrative is the story of another set of sisters, the Brontës. Evocative, emotional, and intelligent, The Mistressclass is an exploration of the desires that move us-toward art and literature, and toward each other.

The Mistressclass: A Novel

Roberts, Michele, Impossible Saints

Impossible Saints

Contemporary

Little,Brown

The Mistressclass

Who is Aurora? Every time she becomes a new Mrs (three times when last we counted) she becomes a new woman: art collector with the first; hippy with the second; deli owner with the last. Sad that they all died. Widowed three times...When Aurora decides to take herself off to Italy to visit her old friend, Nun Leonora, after her last husband's demise, she finds herself plunged into intrigues at the convent; and very odd goings on at the art gallery. Combined with her own dangerous lust for sex and food, this could well be the scenario that reveals the real Aurora - even to herself.

Reader, I Married Him

Little, Brown Book Group

Fair Exchange

Genre Fiction

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Books by Roberts, Michèle