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Jill Paton Walsh was educated at St Michael's Convent, North Finchley, and at St Anne's College, Oxford. She is the author of several highly praised adult novels: Lapsing, A School For Lovers, Knowledge of Angels, which was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize, Goldengrove Unleaving, The Serpentine Cave and A Desert in Bohemia. She has also won many awards for her children's literature, including the Whitbread Prize, the Universe Prize and the Smarties Award. She has three children and lives in Cambridge.
On a remote medieval island, a crucial philosophical debate takes place between Palinor, a shipwrecked atheist, and inquisitors from the church which controls the island and seeks to destroy him. Palinor is a principled and highly educated engineer, whose personal brand of humanism begins to undermine the faith of the gentle monk who is trying to convert him to Christianity. Meanwhile, the Cardinal-Prince Severo aims to reprieve Palinor from death in a bizarre social experiment that hinges on the proven innocence or otherwise of the savage wolf girl captured by simple shepherds; and the lives of the atheist and the wolf child are secretly played off against each other. This brilliant and imaginative novel is related in language that is deceptively simple, belying the complex strands of religion and ideas that provide its underlying drama, and is also remarkable for the rich tapestry of medieval life that it portrays. (Kirkus UK)
