Fervour

Münster 1534 - 1535

In the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation, a devout young woman follows a prophet into a city gripped by fervour, where faith curdles into fanaticism, the sacred turns carnal, and one woman’s descent into religious ecstasy crowns her in complicity with the very abuse she once sought to end.

 

Holland, 1521. When the Sweating Sickness devastates the country, ten-year-old Diera prays to live and a voice answers: Fear not, for I have chosen thee. In the years that follow, her belief in that choosing becomes her anchor, binding her to a convent in Amsterdam even as the Reformation tears through Europe. When a fiery prophet of the coming apocalypse sees her through her habit, he calls her chosen too—and she follows him into the doomsday compound of Münster.

But the Kingdom of God is ruled by men and all their hungers. Crowned queen of a besieged theocracy, Diera is exalted and exploited in equal measure: prisoner and accomplice, lover and betrayer, prophet and heretic. As fear, fervour, and fury consume the city, Diera must decide whether it is God she serves, or her own hungry faith.

For readers of Wolf Hall and Matrix, Fervour is a darkly lyrical novel that explores how belief becomes a weapon and how women become complicit in their own subjugation. Drawing on the visionary terror of Revelation, the erotic ache of the Song of Songs, and the apocalyptic grotesque of Hieronymus Bosch, it reimagines one of the strangest episodes of the Reformation through the eyes of the forgotten woman at its heart.