The Rapture is a wonderful and strange tale of devotion, sexual frustration, sublimated desire, religious ecstasy and mental ill-health.

About the book

Welcome to the Panacea Society, a terribly English cult …

Dilys is a devoted member of The Panacea Society, populated almost entirely by virtuous single ladies.

When she strikes up a friendship with Grace, a new recruit, God finally seems to be smiling upon her. The friends become closer as they wait for the Lord to return to their very own Garden of Eden, and Dilys feels she has found the right path at last.

But Dilys is wary of their leader’s zealotry and suspicious of those who would seem to influence her for their own ends. As her feelings for Grace bud and bloom, the Society around her begins to crumble. Faith is supplanted by doubt as both women come to question what is true and fear what is real.

Gripping, unsettling and ultimately extremely moving. It is a tale beautifully and sensitively told that continues to haunt me. – Ruth Hogan, bestselling author of The Keeper of Lost Things