The Bell [Paperback]

A motley assortment of characters seek peace and salvation in this early masterpiece by the Booker Prize-winning author ofThe Sea, The Sea 

A lay community of thoroughly mixed-up people is encamped outside Imber Abbey, home of an order of sequestered nuns. A new bell is being installed when suddenly the old bell, a legendary symbol of religion and magic, is rediscovered. And then things begin to change. Meanwhile the wise old Abbess watches and prays and exercises discreet authority. And everyone, or almost everyone, hopes to be saved, whatever that may mean. Originally published in 1958, this funny, sad, and moving novel is about religion, sex, and the fight between good and evil.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.The Bell Introduction by A. S. Byatt
The BellPriase for Iris Murdoch andThe Bell:

Murdoch was the rare kind of great, buoyant, confident writer who could drive the whole machine. She was as in touch with animal instincts as intellectual ones. The scope of her vision makes you feel, when you are close to her fiction, that you have glimpsed the sublime. —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

Funny, sad, and moving . . .The Bellis a novel about people who have ideas, people who think, people whose thoughts change their lives just as much as their impulses or their feelings do. —A. S. Byatt

Like the best of Murdoch's novels,The Bellis about love and freedom, the interplay between the two and the dlĂ)