The stillest day

by Josephine Hart

Bethesda Barnet is an artist and a teacher. Her village life with an invalid mother is ordered and calm until the sudden vision of a man's face imprints itself on her mind's eye - and she becomes a woman obsessed. She paints fragmented images of Mathew Pearson, secretly and relentlessly. And then, on the stillest day, in an extreme moment, she performs an act so bold that it shatters lives. For daring to play God, she is sacrificed on the twin altars of convention and vengeance. A painfully beautiful novel about a young woman at the turn of the century who transgresses, both in life and art, the limits set for her, The Stillest Day draws the reader into the darkest corner of a passionate psyche.