Blah Blah Book Club: May 2026 meetup

This month, we will be reading and discussing Rapture by Emily Maguire, long-listed for the 2025 Stella Prize, from our Australian Contemporary category.

BLURB. The motherless child of an English priest living in ninth-century Germany, Agnes is a wild and brilliant girl with a deep, visceral love of God. At eighteen, to avoid a future as a wife or nun, Agnes enlists the help of a lovesick Benedictine monk to disguise herself as a man and devote her life to the study she is denied as a woman. So begins the life of John the Englishman: a matchless scholar and scribe of the revered Fulda monastery, then a charismatic heretic in an Athens commune and, by her middle years, a celebrated teacher in Rome. (320 pages).

Happy reading!