The Bell

By Iris Murdoch,

Book cover of The Bell

Book description

A motley assortment of characters seek peace and salvation in this early masterpiece by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea, The Sea 

A lay community of thoroughly mixed-up people is encamped outside Imber Abbey, home of an order of sequestered nuns. A new bell is being installed when suddenly…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Bell as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

A collective of mercurial personalities, all seeking faith, meaning, sanctuary or peace--some simply seeking their own sense of self--gather for the creation of a lay community in the English countryside beside an epic Benedictine convent where the nuns are forbidden to be seen and the Abbess is as elusive as the Wizard of Oz, and arguably just as questionable.

The story is told primarily through the eyes of a free-spirited, quietly rebellious, naive young woman named Dora Greenfield who arrives at Imber Abbey to reconcile with her hot-headed and ridiculously misogynistic husband who has been assigned the reparation of ancient…

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