Mysterious Ways

By Jennifer Chapman

To be cleansed it to have sinned

Gail Dodkin learns from a very early age that nothing on an ordinary human level touches her.

Certainly not losing her virginity under the railway viaduct at the age of thirteen, or the fury of her own family when she decides to become a nun, nor even the despair of her dead fiancé’s parents.

Only the religious ecstasy of her first mass brings her emotions to life. But in the convent her Mother Superior soon becomes disturbed by Gail’s influence on the enclosed female community and sends Gail to live with her own niece in the south of England.

And so it is that Antonia Laraby and her second husband, Stephen, find their strained marriage extended into an unnatural triangle as each becomes obsessed by the enigmatic newcomer – ‘the little nun’. While May, the unhappy child of Antonia’s first marriage, is also drawn towards Gail in hero-worship of a degree which throws her young life off balance…

In this compelling study in the insidious power of evil, Jennifer Chapman breathes a strange, chilling life into the character of Gail Dodkin. Mysterious Ways is an intriguing novel about the power of one girl – ‘a strange, pale half-person’ – over the men and women whose lives she touches.

Jennifer Chapman is an award-winning journalist and business editor of the Cambridge Evening News. Chapman is also the author of several contemporary novels, as well as having written non-fiction. She received a Society of Authors award for her book, The Last Bastion.