Weak Flesh

Weak Flesh by Kate Pierce is a sensual, darkly comic debut novel set during the suffocating heatwave of 1778 in Provence.

Louise-Hélène, unattractive and already a disappointment in the eyes of her family, arrives at the Abbaye Sainte-Claire de la Lumière hoping that becoming a nun will redeem her family’s ruined reputation.

But beneath the convent’s rituals of prayer, obedience, and silence, something feral stirs: as the local harvest festival approaches, the line between sanctity and sin begins to blur, and Louise-Hélène’s longing to prove her virtue curdles into something far more dangerous.

Told with wit and unexpected tenderness, the novel explores faith, female repression, and the extremes a young woman will go to for absolution for fans of Lauren Groff’s Matrix as if written by Ottessa Moshfegh.