Roland’s Labyrinth

For fans of Geraldine Brooks’s Year of Wonders, a story set in 1400s Provence about a young, passionate doctor who falls in love with a mentally ill young woman--and soon finds himself immersed in a web of danger, deceit, and mystery.

Roland, a young man from Barcelona who inherited a passion for healing others from his deceased mother, has rebelled against his family’s wishes and chosen to attend medical school in France. The university in Montpellier is the most prestigious medical school in all of Europe, and yet Roland is quickly disillusioned by his professors’ false teachings. Seeking more accurate knowledge of the body, he leaves Montpellier and apprentices himself to a surgeon in nearby Arles for the summer.

Roland soon finds himself with two mentors in Arles--Hubert, a master surgeon, and Isaac, a Jewish doctor who advocates searching for remedies in ancient texts and testing them on patients--both of whose lessons he absorbs readily. But when he falls in love with Magali, a young woman suffering from a mental illness, he extends his quest for the truth about the body to include the truth about the mind.

Readers who loved Rachel Kadish’s The Weight of Ink will be drawn to Roland’s story as he follows the woman he loves into her ＂labyrinth of the spirit＂--one filled with wonder, mystery, betrayal, and love--and find themselves enthralled by this finely wrought depiction of the beauty and danger of life in early Renaissance Provence.

Anne Echols is the coauthor (with Marty Williams) of two nonfiction books, Between Pit and Pedestal: Women in the Middle Ages and An Annotated Index of Medieval Women. Her research for those projects inspired her to go beyond historical facts and imagine the fictional stories of ordinary women from the Middle Ages. After earning a BA and master’s degree from Emory University in Atlanta, Anne enjoyed a long career of teaching English to high school students with language learning disabilities. Her husband, Russ, and she have two adult children. Recently retired, she is grateful for the opportunity to divide her time between Silver Spring, Maryland, where her grandchildren live, and Atlanta, Georgia.