'Rapture is astonishing – a scorching vision of a book. Drawing on history, legend, speculation and gossip, Maguire's medieval girl-Pope story is made of many things: flesh and earth and blood; ambition and abnegation; rage and transcendence, all pouring into this pagan, biblical, strange and mighty work from an imagination in soaring flight.' – Charlotte Wood, author of Stone Yard Devotional

'In Rapture, Maguire has performed the dazzling feat of making the earthly feel miraculous and the heavenly feel intimate. This glorious novel both burns and sings.' – Fiona McFarlane, author of The Sun Walks Down

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.