'Set me as a seal on your heart, for love is stronger than death.'

Spanning many years, travelling across Australia's vast continent and through some of Europe's great cities, The Submerged Cathedral is a beguiling, heartbreaking story of paradise and the fall; of faith, sacrifice and atonement; and of sisterly love and rivalry. Most of all, however, it is about an enduring and sacred love - a love stronger than death - and the journeys undertaken in its name.

To read an extract from the novel, click here.

For reading group & book club notes, click here.

For audio book details, click here.

Awards

· 2005 Miles Franklin Prize, shortlist
· 2005 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, South East Asia/South Pacific, shortlist

Reviews

The Bulletin
'A tender, intelligent and beautiful novel ... Wood's writing is made of the same stuff as Debussy's music: exquisite and sometimes dissonant chords; delicate, slow notes; a gentle, passionate witness of the patterns submerged within the real order of things; of longing and elegy. And of love.'

The Sunday Age
'A sustained tribute to romantic passion; the kind of enduring love that survives all manifestations of malevolent fate … this is a book about the cultivation and worship of a relationship, written in such limpid and beautiful prose that Charlotte Wood herself should be celebrated.’

The Sydney Morning Herald
'Assured, bold and elegant, it should cement Wood's fine reputation …The Submerged Cathedral will be celebrated for its capacity to make us weep in a way only the best writing can. It seems little accident that the book takes its title from a song, for the almost exquisite pain that Wood captures usually belongs to the realm of music.'

Jason Steger, The Age
‘A love story shot through with religious overtones... that is as engrossing as it is moving … elliptical, clean and entirely convincing.’

Australian Book Review
‘I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.’

Marie Claire
'Fine writing and a powerful story about love and sacrifice.'

Miles Franklin Award judges
‘A finely wrought novel … convincing, and profoundly moving.’

Antipodes
'In her second novel, The Submerged Cathedral, Charlotte Wood presents readers with a wealth of subtle, intriguing, and suggestive images and an engaging plotline ... Wood pulls off a complex novel with seeming ease and grace ... In the end, Wood provides readers everything they need for a truly pleasurable read: engaging and complex characters, subtle and striking images and metaphors, and the familiar landscapes of natural environment, family dynamics, local and national politics are made unfamiliar and then familiar again.'