The Stillest Day — Josephine Hart

Bethesda Grant is an artist and a teacher. Her village life is order-ed and calm, until one day the sudden vision of a man's face sears itself onto her mind's eye, an imprint of sensual, hypnotic power. She begins to paint fragmented images of Mathew Pearson, secretly and obsessively. But Mathew Pearson has a wife, a small, laughing, preg-nant creature, whom Bethesda's mother befriends. On the stillest day Bethesda performs an act so bold and violent that it shatters all their lives - she performs a very bloody and risky emergency caesarean on Mathew's wife, using a piece of mirror glass, to deliver a baby daughter, leaving the mother dead. THE STILLEST DAY is an exquisitely taut and shocking novel about a young woman at the turn of the century who transgresses - both in life and in art - the limits set down for her.