International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award

"That it should finally come to this. I move forward without desire or hope of salvation. I do not expect to extricate myself, exonerate, or in any way escape. I do not hope to save myself. One does not kill two young bucks from Harvard and live. One does not in their most adorable postcoital bliss kill them and get away with it.". Her name is Bernadette O'Brien. The unhappy child born into a working-class Irish Catholic family. The misfit and girl-genius, who entered the halls of academic privilege at the age of twelve and rose within its ranks to become a respected professor of physics at Harvard. The defiant woman, inspired in "a most scrumptious occasion of sin" to commit an extraordinary crime. The Death Row celebrity sentenced to die in the electric chair for the shocking sexual murder of two of her most promising male students, her "sweet phallocentrics". In her journal ("my death book"), Bernadette takes a dark and resolute look back at the unfolding events that led to the horrific crimes for which she stood trial. For which she was condemned and for which she is now caged to dream, to imagine, to confess. Defiance is a haunting chronicle of Bernadette's loves, longings, and losses. It is a story of a lonely, brilliant woman trapped in her own mind, "in this prison, within a prison, within a prison", where she replays her crimes and reconstructs the past, drawing the reader into the heart of her dark secret. A page-turning novel of suspense, transgression, and dark humor; a probe into the depths of the female psyche - inextricably embedded in a uniquely American matrix of violence, sexuality, and class difference - Defiance is a raw and fearless performance by an author of fierce and uncompromising vision. Poignant and provocative, harrowing and hypnotic, Defiance is like nothing you have ever read before.
Carole Maso is the author of five novels: Ghost Dance, The Art Lover, AVA, Aureole, and The American Woman in the Chinese Hat. The recipient of the Lannan Literary Fellowship for fiction, Maso is currently director of the Creative Writing Program and professor of English at Brown University.

Defiance by Carole Maso Nominated by:

Defiance by
Carole Maso

Nominated by: