The Sin Eater

2021 | Fiction & Poetry | Mystery | Science Fiction/Fantasy | Thriller

Can you uncover the truth when you’re forbidden from speaking it?

A Sin Eater’s duty is a necessary evil: she hears the final private confessions of the dying, eats their sins as a funeral rite, and so guarantees their souls access to heaven.

It is always women who eat sins - since it was Eve who first ate the Forbidden Fruit - and every town has at least one, not that they are public ally acknowledged. Stained by the sins they are obliged to consume, the Sin Eater is shunned and silenced, doomed to live in exile at the edge of town.

Recently orphaned Mary Owens is just 14, and has never considered what it might be like to be ostracised; she’s more concerned with where her next meal is coming from. When she’s arrested for stealing a loaf of bread, however, and subsequently sentenced to become a Sin Eater, finding food is suddenly the last of her worries.

It’s a devastating sentence, but May’s new invisibility opens new doors. And when first on, then two of the Queen’s courtiers grows ill suddenly, May hears their deathbed confessions - and begins to investigate a terrible rumour that is only whispered of amid palace corridors.

Set in a thinly disguised 16th century England, it’s a wonderfully imaginative and gripping story of treason and treachery; of secrets and silence; of women, of power - and ultimately, of the strange freedom that comes from being an outcast with no hope of redemption for, as May learns, being a nobody sometimes counts for everything.

Megan Campisi (Author)