This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. In Puritan Boston a young woman is led from the prison door to the pillory, an infant in her arms and a letter A stitched in scarlet on her breast. The magistrates demand the father's name. Hester Prynne refuses to give it, and goes on refusing for seven years.
She lives at the edge of the settlement, sewing for the town that shuns her, raising a strange bright child named Pearl. The minister Arthur Dimmesdale grows frailer each year, pressing his hand to his heart in the pulpit while his congregation calls him a saint. And an old physician arrives in the colony under a false name, takes lodgings with the minister, and begins, very slowly and with great patience, to look for something.
Hester carries her shame in the open. Two men carry theirs in secret, and the novel is quietly certain about which of them is being destroyed by it.
The founding masterpiece of American fiction: a study of guilt, hypocrisy, and the difference between penance and repentance.
