Sceptre buys retelling of Pope Joan from Australian author Emily Maguire 

Sceptre has bought the first historical novel from Australian author Emily Maguire, about the legend of Pope Joan, the first (and only) female Roman Catholic pontiff.

Executive publisher Federico Andornino acquired world rights, excluding Australia and New Zealand, to Rapture from Grace Heifetz at Left Bank Literary. In Australia and New Zealand the novel will be published by Jane Palfreyman at Allen & Unwin; Hungarian rights have also been sold to Athenaeum.

Rapture is a retells of Joan – the first (and only) female pope to have reigned over the Catholic Church, centring on the motherless child of an English priest living in ninth-century Mainz. Agnes is a wild and brilliant girl with a deep, visceral love of God. At 18, to avoid a future as a wife or nun, Agnes enlists the help of a lovesick Benedictine monk to disguise herself as a man and secure a place at a monastery. 

Under her new persona, John the Englishman, Agnes becomes a scholar and later celebrated teacher in Rome. She dazzles the church hierarchy with her knowledge of the old and new languages and finds herself "at the heart of political intrigue in a city where gossip is a powerful (and deadly) currency. And when the only person who knows her identity arrives in Rome, she will risk everything to once again feel what it is to be known – and loved.”

It is the first historical novel written by Maguire, whose 2016 title, An Isolated Incident (Lightning Books) was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the two premier literary prizes in Australia. She was twice named as a Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year.

Sceptre will publish Rapture in export trade paperback and digitally in autumn 2024, with a hardback set for spring 2025.  

Andornino said: “I first came across Emily’s writing when I travelled to Sydney as part of the Visiting International Publishers fellowship, organised by Creative Australia. I was immediately taken by the idea of a novel set in the Middle Ages, a book that would reframe one of the most intriguing – and controversial – figures in Christianity. For centuries people have argued over the story of a female pope. Catholic cover-up or anti-clerical invention? Feminist icon or symbol of women’s inherent wickedness? Cautionary tale or the most successful fraudster of all time? Rapture does not try to answer these questions, but it does introduce readers to a brilliantly alive character: Agnes, the woman at the centre of this novel is a smart, hungry girl who sees an opportunity to have a bigger life and takes it.”

Maguire added: “Rapture is a bit of a departure for me, in that it’s set more than a thousand years and 15,000km away from the contemporary Sydney of my previous novels. Nevertheless, in its themes and energy, its voice and ambition, it’s the novel I’ve been working towards my entire writing life.”