England, 1276: Forced to leave her home village, Eleanor moves to Lincoln to work as a housemaid. She's prickly, independent and stubborn, her prospects blighted by a port-wine birthmark across her face. Unusually for a woman, she has fine skills with ink and quill, and harbours a secret ambition to work as a scribe, a profession closed to women.
Eleanor discovers that Lincoln is a dangerous place, divided by religious prejudice, the Jews frequently the focus of violence and forced to wear a yellow badge. Eleanor falls in love with Asher, a Jewish spicer, who shares her love of books and words, but their relationship is forbidden by law. When Eleanor is pulled into the dark depths of the church's machinations against Jews and the king issues an edict expelling all Jews from England, Eleanor and Asher are faced with an impossible choice.
“Luminous, lyrical and deeply moving, Cadwallader’s writing fills the senses and sings with detail and authenticity. A compelling story of love, resilience and hope in the face of oppression and racism, alive with imagery.”
Vivid, rich, deep and sensual, The Fire and the Rose is a tender and moving novel about how language, words and books have the power to change and shape lives. Most powerfully, it is also a novel about what it is to be made 'other', to be exiled from home and family. But it is also a call to recognise how much we need the other, the one we do not understand, making it a strikingly resonant and powerfully hopeful novel for our times.
Meet Robyn in conversation with Emily Maguire.
Tickets: $10 (Entry only) // $40 (includes a discounted copy of the book RRP $32.99)
Robyn Cadwallader lives among vineyards in beautiful Ngunnawal country. Her first novel, The Anchoress, was published internationally to critical acclaim. It won a Canberra Critics' Circle Award for fiction and was nominated for the Indie Book Awards, Adelaide Festival Awards, ABIA Awards and ACT Book of the Year Award. Her second novel, Book of Colours, won the 2019 ACT Book of the Year Award, received a Canberra Critics' Circle Award and was shortlisted for the Voss Award. Her reviews, prize-winning short stories and poems have been published in journals in Australia and the USA; her poetry collection, i painted unafraid, was released in 2010. A non-fiction book based on her PhD thesis about virginity and female agency in the Middle Ages was published in 2008. In response to the Australian government's punitive treatment of asylum seekers, she edited a collection of essays on asylum seeker policy, We Are Better Than This in 2015.
Emily Maguire is the author of six novels, including the Stella Prize and Miles Franklin shortlisted An Isolated Incident, and three non-fiction books. Emily’s articles and essays on sex, feminism, culture and literature have been published widely including in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Observer and The Age.
Emily works as a teacher and as a mentor to young and emerging writers, was the 2018/2019 Writer-in-Residence at the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney and is the 2023 HC Coombs Creative Arts Fellow at the Australian National University. Her latest book is the novel Love Objects.