A powerfully involving new novel from one of America's finest writers.
Sister Cecilia lives for music, for those hours when she can play her beloved Chopin on the piano. It isn't that she neglects her other duties, rather it is the playing itself - distilled of longing - that disturbs her sisters. The very air of the convent thickens with the passion of her music, and when the Mother Superior wakes to find herself bathed with sweat and tears, to the insinuating soft largo of the Prelude in E Minor, the young girl is asked to leave. And so it is that Sister Cecilia appears before Berndt Vogel on his farm, destitute, looking for sanctuary.
Decades later, old Father Damien lays down his pen and dresses for bed. Slowly, he removes his heavy robes, undergarments and, at last, a bandage wound tightly around a woman's breasts. Having lived for so long as a man, he fears that the discovery of his true identity will undo all that he has accomplished.
