The Hermitage by Quentin S. Crisp
Published 1 December 2026.
With an afterword by Nina Power
Paperback ISBN 9781068450747, RRP £11.99/$16/€14.
Ebook ISBN 9781068450754, RRP £9.99/$12.99/€10.99.
Audiobook ISBN 9781919109015.
From the delightfully idiosyncratic imagination of Quentin S. Crisp comes an exquisite post-pastoral novella about an encounter with mystery. The Hermitage is the story of a secret half-revealed, an epiphany half-realized. Join the narrator as he pursues a chimera from the green heart of England to the grey modernity of urban sprawl.
A young man’s solitary pilgrimage to a tiny West Country church, a journey ostensibly inspired by the literary figure Sabine Baring-Gould, eccentric librettist of Onward Christian Soldiers, turns into a semi-mystical experience when the pilgrim, responding to some obscure prompting of the soul, stops at the old sacristy, now known as the Hermitage.
Here he learns something of the long history of the tiny church and of its strange revival after years of desertion and ruin. More significantly, he learns of the troubled, yet obscurely fulfilled life of Old Mazy Parkin, who acts as sacristan, and how the homeless tramp became a hermit.
Many years later, living in a tower block next to a T-Junction, inured to the hum of electrical devices and the incessant wailing of sirens, the narrator reflects on how the pilgrimage shaped his expectations and on the course his life has since taken. What was the meaning of the silence that Mazy Parkin faced but that he, the pilgrim, could not?
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Praise for The Hermitage
This gently, precisely written tale is of an experience of vitality that is, at once, clearly felt and yet out of reach. Crisp raises one of the great questions of our age: How to participate in life beyond the confines of our isolated psyches? He does not provide direct answers; sometimes to know one’s predicament is a first step towards change.
Mark Vernon, author of A Secret History of Christianity
As much a story as an extended meditation on what’s beyond all theological musings and doctrinal disputes — namely the concrete encounter with the sacred, and how such an event will mark and shape the rest of one’s life. The grey spectre of modernity, which so haunts this novella’s protagonist, is revealed to be ephemeral mist when contrasted with the presence of the Mystery, which comes to meet us completely unanticipated, and which once encountered cannot be forgotten. It is a perilous thing to walk out into the marvellous landscape of rural England, for before long you may find yourself trespassing on the holy. Thereafter, entanglement in modern life will be all the more painful.
Sebastian Morello, author of Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries
The Hermitage is thought-provoking and beautifully written, a meditation on a partly remembered, perhaps partly imagined place of refuge from the world. Crisp is one of the most beguiling, accomplished, and enjoyable writers of our generation.
R. B. Russell, author of Waiting for the End of the World
About the author
Quentin S. Crisp
Quentin S. Crisp is the author of The Hermitage, Hamster Dam, and numerous other novels and short story collections.
