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Frost In May

  • Author
    • Antonia White
Format
Regular price £9.99
Regular price Sale price £9.99
Nanda Gray, the daughter of a Catholic convert, is nine when she is sent to the Convent of Five Wounds. Quick-witted, resilient and eager to please, she accepts this closed world where, with all the enthusiasm of the outsider, her desires and passions become only those the school permits. Her only deviation from total obedience is the passionate friendships she makes.

Convent life is perfectly captured - the smell of beeswax and incense; the petty cruelties of the nuns; the eccentricities of Nanda's school friends.
  • Published: Jun 28 2010
  • 197 x 129mm
  • ISBN: 9781844083787
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Press Reviews

  • Hermione Lee

    Observer
    Frost in May is the unsurpassed novel of convent school life. This story of a clash between a determined young girl and an authoritarian regime is both perceptive and painfully emotional, convincing in every detail
  • Carol Shields

    Evelyn Waugh called [her] one of the very best novelists of the day - a title she still deserves
  • Elizabeth Bowen
    Intense, troubling, semi-miraculous ... IT is not the only school story to be a classic; but I can think of no other that is a work of art
  • Selina Hastings

    A masterpiece. Beautifully written, it is a calm and factual record of the slow death of the soul
  • Tessa Hadley

    A small masterpiece, the compelling and passionate story of young girls at a repressive religious school, told with such lyricism and elegant economy, such subtle understanding