Joan of Arc: Whispers from God In 1425, a thirteen-year-old farmer's daughter in the village of Domrémy hears a voice in her garden. By 1431, she is dead - burned in a marketplace in Rouen at nineteen. In between, she lifted a siege that was about to fall, led an army across hostile country, stood in a cathedral while a king was crowned, and held her convictions intact through months of imprisonment and a rigged trial designed to destroy them. Joan of arc follows Jehanne of Domrémy from her childhood on the fractured border of a France deep into the Hundred Years' War, through her campaigns as the unlikely commander who reversed the momentum of a century of English advance, to her capture, trial, and execution. Drawing directly on the extraordinary documentary record of Joan of Arc's two trials - the condemnation and the rehabilitation - the novel stays close to what is actually known while inhabiting the inner life that the records can only suggest. At its center is a simple question with no simple answer: what does it take to do an impossible thing? Joan heard something, believed it, and acted on it - against every obstacle of gender, class, education, and institutional power - with a consistency that astonished her allies, frightened her enemies, and has refused to be forgotten for six hundred years.