Sin eater : a novel
"In Elizabeth I's England, a fourteen-year-old girl who steals a loaf of bread is sentenced to be a sin eater, a shunned woman who must assume the sins of the dead, and becomes drawn into a dangerous mystery at the heart of a corrupt and violent court. For the crime of stealing bread, fourteen-year-old May receives a life sentence: she must become a Sin Eater--a shunned woman, brutally marked, whose fate is to hear the final confessions of the dy...