Joan of Domrémy

Summary

In this darkly comic parable of sin and sainthood, a fifteenth-century peasant girl, Joan of Domrémy, must secure an audience with the derelict Dauphin of France, that he might unite his armies under her leadership against ongoing English invasion.

But with her angelically inspired project seeming doomed to failure and ridicule, and with no royal meeting in sight, the girl strikes a dangerous bargain with an old acquaintance—a spirit of uncertain motives—leading to an existential showdown between piety and personal pride which may cost Joan not only her soul but the future of her nation.

Joan of Domrémy has been called “a storybook for grownups,” a teasing metaphysical page-turner in the tradition of Isak Dinesen and Flannery O’Connor, telling us the story of St. Joan of Arc as we’ve never heard it before.