Book description
After more than twenty years confined behind high walls, Sister Mary
Hilary runs away, on impulse, from the strict contemplative convent she
entered at the age of seventeen; hits the crowds of London on chaotic
Christmas Eve. She has been living in strict silence in the rural depths
of Norfolk with just a dozen fellow nuns, has never handled money, never
dressed in anything but long medieval robes, yet now she is confronted
with superstores and towering blocks, confused by noise and neon,
jostled by the rude mob battling home.
She has no home - nor any plans of prospects; has lived for God alone;
has lived for God alone; her chief work prayer, her duty to deny and
punish self. But can she survive without a self, in a self-regarding
world she barely recognises, a greedy, permissive and amoral world,
where media hype runs riot, a celibate priest seduces her, and even a
Charismatic Conference seems a hotbed of hysteria?
Wendy Perriam takes a sharp look at modern society through the eyes of
an innocent outsider, a thirty-nine-year-old adolescent, who knows
nothing of life or men, and who - once Christ’s Virgin Bride - now
gropes towards as yet untasted pleasures: those of friendship,
sensuality and love.
Devils, for a Change
is the controversial and profoundly disturbing story of a novice in the
world, a woman struggling for identity, who ultimately finds healing in
a haunting and unexpected finale. It is told with all the wit, verve and
uninhibited sexuality which have made Ms Perriam’s name.
‘Start reading it at bedtime and you won’t put it down until dawn. Buy
it - even if you have to mortgage the week’s lunch.’ She
Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her
first ‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and
told she was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read
History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs,
ranging from artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her
time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she
went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed
for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written
extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor
to radio programmes such as Stop the Week
and Fourth Column
.
Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences - strict
convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and
divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic
Bedlam - have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for
shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the
well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in
a straitjacket.’
