FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
A fascinating debut novel.
“Explores timeless feminist questions with patience and grace. A must read!” —Julie Chibbaro, author, Into the Dangerous World
A medieval girl thrust into an unheard-of situation, the holy woman she’s forced to serve, and a 21st-century scholar searching for them across time.
In fourteenth-century England, twelve-year-old Elinor is enclosed with an anchoress, Lady Adela, in a cell at Wenfair Abbey. Other than occasional visits from a monk at the Abbey, Elinor has only the intense and mercurial Adela for company—until she becomes aware of the many women who visit the cell at night, whispering through the window when they find themselves unhappily pregnant, and desperate for holy—and practical—help.
Meanwhile, in 2017, Liz Pace is an adjunct professor of medieval studies in upstate New York. She wrote her PhD dissertation on purgatory, but is fascinated by anchoresses. Liz is pregnant, and preparing for her presentation at an academic conference, which she hopes will land her a book contract, but which instead inspires a research trip to England. There she discovers a long-lost medieval book of hours, inscribed with the name Elinor.
This passionate novel traces the lives of two women separated by 700 hundred years, as each navigates the needs and demands of the body, and the burdens and rewards of faith, obligation, and what—for each of them—is a kind of ordinary devotion.
Ordinary Devotion: A Novel by Kristen Holt-Browning (Paperback, 260 pp.; ISBN 978-1958972472; US $24.99) is being published by Monkfish on Tuesday, November 5, 2024. Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution.
“No reader will remain unmoved by Elinor’s extraordinary devotion both to Adela, with her secret compassion for women, and to the green, sensual living world beyond the cell.” —Elizabeth Cunningham, author of The Maeve Chronicles
“Holt-Browning’s writing is so vivid that during the passages that take place in the enclosed cell in which Adela and Elinor are indefinitely confined, I could feel my breath quickening as I imagined the dark, cold space, felt the palpable loneliness of a child recently separated from her family and the rural landscape she understands and loves. Holt-Browning is adept at honing in on the passion for life, for nature, for language that can sustain a person through the hardest times.” —Nerissa Nields, author of Plastic Angel
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For author interviews and review copies, contact jon@monkfishpublishing.com.
Kristen Holt-Browning is a novelist, poet, and freelance copy editor and proofreader. Her poetry chapbook, The Only Animal Awake in the House, was published by Moonstone Press in 2021. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in several literary journals, including Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hunger Mountain, and Necessary Fiction. She holds a BA from Connecticut College and an MA from University College London. Ordinary Devotion is her debut novel.
