‘A Jesuit would have sorted me out’

Ed West discusses faith, feminism and Dawkins with the author of this summer's most talked-about religious novel
7 August 2009

For the first time in about seven years the most talked-about religious novel of the summer is not one of the Da Vinci Code's step-children about conspiracies and lost arks, but a story set in the more historically accurate, but equally fantastic, world of a 16th-century Italian convent.

Sarah Dunant's Sacred Hearts, which takes place in the aftermath of the Council of Trent, has received rave reviews in the Times, Telegraph, Financial Times and Washington Post, and has already been serialised on Radio 4. the rest image