Imagine leaving ordinary life behind when you are just 17, never to enjoy the changing seasons or human company again. Imagine entering a dank cell attached to a village church, and even having burial rites performed over you before the door is nailed shut behind you. Imagine what ­happens to you there, as you try to focus on praying for the community you have left behind, living a holy life of solitude.This is the challenge Australian author and medievalist Robyn Cadwallader has set herself in her debut novel, which explores the fate of Sarah, an anchoress in thirteenth-century England. She enters her enclosure willingly, led by her faith, but also in recoil from budding bodily desires and as a shock response to her sister’s death in childbirth. Sarah soon finds life in the cel