The Stillest Day

Bethesda Barnet is an artist and a teacher. Her village life with an invalid mother is almost ritualistically ordered and calm-`One foot before the other, quietly tapping out the years. ' 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, pregnant creature, whom Bethesda`s mother befriends On the stillest day, in an extreme moment, 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 deliever a baby daughter, leaving the mother dead. For thinking she can play God , she falls from grace, and is sacrficed on the altars of convention and vengeance. 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.