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.

Author Biography

Born and educated in Ireland, Josephine Hart is the bestselling author of Damage (filmed with Juliette Binoche and Jeremy Irons), Sin and Oblivion. Her work has been translated into twenty-six languages. She founded Gallery Poets and produced several successful West End plays, including The House of Bernarda Alba, The Vortex and Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince, and has also presented Thames TV's Books By My Bedside. She is married to Maurice Saatchi and has two sons. She lives in London.