Cover Design Deb Snibson
Permission to use cover image should be directed to Spinifex Press
Evil

Diane Bell

1-876756-55-1
Price: $24.95 (Australian dollars),
$34.95 (NZ dollars),
$14.95 (US dollars)
$27.95 (Canadian dollars)
£8.95 (UK pounds)


    “Sex, silence and sin”, this is what newly appointed professor, Dee P. Scrutari, writes in her notebook as she turns her anthropological gaze on the tribe of “non-reproducing males” who dominate St Jude’s, a prestigious Catholic liberal arts college. Evil is in the air.

    Something is awry. What happened to the previous occupant of her newly-painted office? Professor Scrutari’s fieldwork begins. Her notebooks fill. And the mystery mounts: disturbing odours that no air cleanser will disperse, turbulent faculty meetings, tenurepolitics, intrigue around women’s bodies, and a strange ginger cat. The mix is complicated by secret student alliances, predatory priests, the end of a marriage and new love, an imperious college president, a lumbering dean, a faction-ridden Religious Studies Department, a radical mass and a dissident feminist liturgy.

All of us who have read and loved Daughters of the Dreaming know that Diane Bell is both a brilliant anthropologist and writer of rich, evocative prose. Now she has given us a gripping novel, and what better subject for her unflinching gaze than the culture of higher education and religion.
— Cassandra Pybus, author of The Devil and James McAuley

With a discerning anthropologist's eye and a deft novelist's hand, Diane Bell skewers and dissects the customs of an exotic and endangered tribe — the administrators, faculty and staff of a small Catholic college in the USA. This novel is disturbing and witty, but ultimately hopeful, for in this fictional world, evil is beaten back and ethical women triumph.
— Janet Catherine Berlo, author of Quilting Lessons and Wild by Design

"What Diane has done is to create out of her imagination, out of her experience, a wonderfully structured, layered novel." -Sara Dowse

"...a thinking woman's Da Vinci Code"
— Frances Cruickshank

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ISBN 1876756551 
Territories World