In 1413, two of the most important women in the history of literature met. They were the anchoress (or religious hermit) Julian of Norwich, whose Revelations of Divine Lis the earliest surviving book written in English by a woman, and Margery Kempe the Christian mystic whose dictated autobiography is the first ever to have been written in English by man or woman. Their encounter, in Norwich at the cell in which Julian had by then been willingly incarcerated for more than 20 years, provides the climax to Victoria MacKenzie’s transfixing debut novel

That these two women’s experiences have been preserved is a miracle, and in animating them with such vibrancy, MacKenzie gestures also to the multitudinous others that have gone unrecorded.