From inside her cell in the wall of the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents, Alix, a young Parisian recluse, observes a tumultuous world of thieves and scoundrels, rebels, heretics and pilgrims. Set during the Hundred Year's War and based on the historical figure of Alix la Bourgotte, Sealed in Stone traces the intersecting lives of a vagabond Turkish sailor, a Bohemian intellectual, the amazing Alix and a young rebel from Lombardy who finds himself powerfully drawn to her.
Toni Maraini's Sealed in Stone, an allegorical novel set in the heart of medieval Paris, radiantly portrays the triumph of the soul over the darkness of existence. An extraordinary achievement.--Lucia A. Blackstone
. . . a strange and necessary novel.--Alberto Moravia
Toni Maraini is an Italian poet, novelist and art critic. She grew up in an literary family in Sicily, and has lived in Paris, London, Casablanca and New York. She currently lives in Rome.
About the Author: Born in Tokyo (Japan), Toni Maraini spent two years (1943-1945) as a small child in a Japanese concentration camp after the family was arrested for being anti-Fascist. She grew up in Sicily after the war, and went to high school in Florence. She studied art history and anthropology at London University, at Smith College (USA) and at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. From 1964 to 1986 she lived in Morocco, where she taught at Rabat University. In Morocco she did pioneer field research in art and culture. There, she published several books (essays, art history) and three collections of poems (Message d'une Migration, 1976, Le Récit de l'Occultation, 1984, Phantasmata Diwan, 1990). She works now in Italy as a freelance author (criticism, poetry, novels, essays) and continues to write on North African culture and to translate North African writers and poets.
