Emily Maguire in-conversation with Charlotte Wood

'Her self is an illusion yet it is one beloved by most everyone who has heard her speak . . . She is thirty-three years old and there is no one else in the world who knows who she used to be.' 

The motherless child of an English priest living in ninth-century Mainz, Agnes is a wild and brilliant girl with a deep, visceral love of God. At eighteen, to avoid a future as a wife or nun, Agnes enlists the help of a lovesick Benedictine monk to disguise herself as a man and devote her life to the study she is denied as a woman. So begins the life of John the Englishman: a matchless scholar and scribe of the revered Fulda monastery, then a charismatic heretic in an Athens commune and, by her middle years, a celebrated teacher in Rome. 

There, Agnes (as John) dazzles the Church hierarchy with her knowledge and wisdom and finds herself at the heart of political intrigue in a city where gossip is a powerful-and deadly-currency. And when the only person who knows her identity arrives in Rome, she will risk everything to once again feel what it is to be known-and loved. 

Rapture is an astonishing, transformative and audacious novel that confirms Emily Maguire as one of our finest writers.

Emily Maguire is the author of seven novels, including An Isolated Incident, shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2017, and Love Objects, shortlisted for the Australian Book Industry Awards Literary Fiction Book of the Year and the Margaret & Colin Roderick Literary Award in 2022, as well as three non-fiction books. Her articles and essays on sex, feminism and culture have been published widely including in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Observer and The Age. Emily works as a teacher and as a mentor to young and emerging writers and was the 2023 HC Coombs Creative Arts Fellow at the Australian National University.

Charlotte Wood is the author of ten books - seven novels and three non-fiction works. She has won the Stella Prize and the Prime Minister's Literary Award, among others, and her features and essays have appeared in The Guardian, New York Times, Sydney Morning Herald, The Monthly, Saturday Paper and others.