On Monday, December 1, at 6:00 p.m., in the Easton branch of the Talbot County Free Library, “library guy” Bill Peak will celebrate the official launch of his novel, “The Oblate’s Confession.” Refreshments and hors d’oeuvres will be on offer, courtesy of Secant Publishing. Peak will give a brief reading, after which copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing.
“The Oblate’s Confession” is set in the 7th century in England. Petty Anglo-Saxon kingdoms regularly make war on one another and their Celtic neighbors. Christianity is a new force in the land, one whose hold remains tenuous at best. Power shifts back and forth uneasily between two forms of the new faith: a mystical Celtic Catholicism and a newer, more disciplined form of Catholicism emanating from Rome. Pagan rites as yet survive in the surrounding hills and mountains. Plague sweeps across the countryside unpredictably, its path marked by death and destruction.
In keeping with a practice common at the time, an Anglo-Saxon warrior donates his youngest child to the monastery of Redestone, intending the boy to spend the rest of his life there and eventually become a monk. This gift-child, called an oblate, will grow up in the abbey knowing little of his family or the expectations his natural father will someday place upon him, his existence haunted by vague memories of a former life and the questions those memories provoke.
Who is his father, the distant chieftain who sired him or the bishop he prays for daily? And to which father, natural or spiritual, will he owe allegiance when, at length, he is called upon to ally himself with one and destroy the other? These are the dilemmas the child faces. The answers will emerge from the years he spends in spiritual apprenticeship to a hermit who lives on the nearby mountain of Modra nect.
While entirely a work of fiction, the novel’s background is historically accurate: all the kings and queens named really lived, all the political divisions and rivalries described actually existed, and each of the plagues that visit the author’s imagined monastery did in fact ravage that long-ago world. In the midst of a tale that touches the human in all of us, readers of “The Oblate’s Confession” will find themselves treated to a history of the “Dark Ages” unlike anything available today outside of textbooks and original source material.
All library programs are free and open to the public. Patrons do not need to pre-register to attend this program. For more information, call the library at 410-822-1626, or visit www.tcfl.org.
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