The Maiden of All Our Desires, a new historical novel by Peter Manseau, begins with a thrashing storm that “would become the stuff of bards’ tales and poetry”. The blizzard “would only be spoken in frightened whispers”, for it ravaged the land – even “stone churches were said to have vanished in the wind”. Manseau follows the hyperbolic description of the storm with a detailed, yet equally surreal rendering of Mother John, the abbess at Gaerdegen, a wilderness convent: “her body hidden under the shearling blanket that was the privilege of her office, she appeared just then only a head, the skull of a martyr on a lambskin pillow. Still breathing, and already she was the perfect relic: a withered globe of skull-white flesh. Eight brown teeth like rats in a hole.”