The Woman Who Was God

Description

Although her son, Jim, apparently died in an accident. Ruth St Just is doubtful. She might not have understood why he joined a religious community on the tiny African island of Ellamore, or even why he had gone abroad in the first place, but the manner of his death doesn't ring true. The Foreign Office are unconcerned however. No matter how much this obsessive woman badgers them, investigations go no further. Frustrated, Ruth takes matters into her own hands. She sets off on a personal mission to Africa, determined to expose the sordid truth behind the sinister sect and the mysterious, charismatic woman who reigns over it, and to uncover among the bizarre band of misfits and eccentrics, the disturbing circumstances that led to the death of her son.

Born in Switzerland, Francis King spent his childhood in India, where his father was a government official. While still an undergraduate at Oxford he published his first three novels. He then joined the British Council, working in Italy, Greece, Egypt, Finland and Japan, before he resigned to devote himself entirely to writing. For some years he was drama critic for the Sunday Telegraph and he reviewed fiction regularly for the Spectator. He won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize and the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award for Act of Darkness (1983). His penultimate book, The Nick of Time, was long-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize. Francis King died in 2011. "One of our great writers, of the calibre of Graham Greene and Nabokov." Beryl Bainbridge

'A Gothic creation of power and brilliance, full of bizarre episodes that crash the weird and the ordinary against each other.' Observer ' Essential reading - this novel will resonate in the mind for a long time to come.' Financial Times 'Francis King ... is prolific, fluent, judicious and moving. He leads us through the novel as an initiate would lead us through a maze.' Melvyn Bragg