Obedience

"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, Man Booker-Prize winning author of Wolf Hall

"With delicacy and restraint, Jacqueline Yallop lets us get close to her characters yet never judges them--crucial, when dealing with the self-deluded and the self-righteous. Obedience is the best kind of Occupation romance: forbidden, tortured and indelible."-Stewart O'Nan, author of Emily Alone

"The character of Sister Bernard is a Madame Bovary of the convent world. Her fantasy and insatiable need for love prove to be far greater than her ability to analyze character. While superficially simplistic, her relationship with God is complex and she is capable of battling God with the strength of Joan of Arc. These contradictions in her character are seamless and a complex and unforgettable character emerges."-Catherine Gildiner, author of After the Falls

"A work of great originality, devastating in its impact... Yallop is a writer of rare fine judgment and delicacy... Intensely compassionate in her depiction of old age and its attendant miseries - in particular loneliness - Yallop is also uncompromising, insistently raising questions of culpability and complicity that seem calculated to disturb. As powerful as it is subtle, a novel of gripping emotional and psychological intensity."-Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail

"[A] spellbinding tale of betrayal and illicit desire...it is the human experience of love, desire, guilt and loneliness that are at the heart of the novel. Yallop writes with real flair about these emotions, and it is some measure of her skill that she turns a nun's failed hopes into a compelling and quietly devastating story about a woman destroyed by her faith."-The Independent

"A disturbing, coolly elegant convent-set fiction...Yallop is a powerful and seductive writer, and accomplishes the tricky task of fixing her readers' attention on a protagonist who is slow-witted, possibly to the point of being devoid of moral sense, yet gripped by two passions-sacred and profane love-usually regarded as the noblest emotions of the human spirit...Yallop's fiction forces us into an intensely troubling moral voyeurism."-Sunday Telegraph