"Prisoner of God" is a revolutionary testimony against the Church and its methods, against the brainwashing to which many members are submitted, and the power and influence it exerts across a broad spectrum of society. It is also an account of the mysterious world of the abbeys: the monks' everyday life and the way they deal with solitude, silence and sexuality. A brilliant student with a promising career ahead of him as a biologist under the guidance of Nobel Prize-winner Jacques Monod, M...

Aunt Zenobia is lending her country house to Ludo and Ariana. Over the summer, Ariana makes a new friend and Ludo creates his dream garden.

Since Ludo fell for Denis's mom, he's been behaving very strangely.

WINNER OF THE FRENCH GRAND PRIX DU ROMAN POLICIER'Beautifully written . . . An excellent thriller.' WALL STREET JOURNAL'Zen is one of the greatest creations of contemporary crime fiction.' OBSERVERAN AURELIO ZEN MYSTERYPrince Ludovico Ruspanti died falling a hundred and fifty feet in St Peter's church, in the heart of the Vatican. But did he fall, or was he pushed?I...

In 1941, a brilliant, good-looking young man decided to give up a promising literary career in New York to enter a monastery in Kentucky, from where he proceeded to become one of the most influential writers of this century. Talk about losing your life in order to find it. Thomas Merton's 1st book, The Seven Storey Mountain, describes his early doubts, his conversion to a Catholic faith of extreme certainty, & his decision to take life vows as a Trappist. Although his conversionary piety s...

"The best kind of memoir, revealing, refreshing, and reflective enough to make readers turn many of the questions on themselves." — Booklist (starred review)With humor and opinions aplenty, a woman embarks on an unconventional quest to see if she is meant to be a nun.Just as Jane Christmas decides to enter a convent in mid-life to find out whether she is "nun material," her long-term partner Colin, suddenly springs a marriage proposal on her. Deter...

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GILES FODENQuerry, a world famous architect, is the victim of a terrible attack of indifference: he no longer finds meaning in art or pleasure in life. Arriving anonymously at a Congo leper village, he is diagnosed as the mental equivalent of a 'burnt-out case', a leper mutilated by disease and amputation. Querry slowly moves towards a cure, his mind getting clearer as he works for the colony. However, in the heat of the tropics, no relationship with a marri...

From the French Abbey of St Wandrille to the abandoned and awesome Rock Monasteries of Cappadocia in Turkey, the celebrated travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor studies the rigorous contemplative lives of the monks and the timeless beauty of their monastic surroundings. In his occasional retreats, the peaceful solitude and the calm enchantment of the monasteries was passed on as a kind of 'supernatural windfall' which A Time to Keep Silence so effortlessly records.

This diary of a monastic life is "a continuation of The Seven Storey Mountain . . . Astonishing" ( Commonweal).Chronicling six years of Thomas Merton's life in a Trappist monastery, The Sign of Jonas takes us through his day-to-day experiences at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, where he lived in silence and prayer for much of his life.Concluding with the account of Merton's ordination as a priest, this diary documents his gro...

A practical and playful guide to balancing and maintaining physical and mental harmony.The modern world can present the body as a machine that just needs to be regularly exercised. However, it is a remarkably sensitive organ in which a lot of our pain and hope is stored and that we need to interpret and handle with subtlety. This impact of our body upon our mind is something which needs to be explored as it is easy to pay attention to one more than the other and to ...

Amongst the ancient papyri of the Dead Sea, a remarkable scroll is discovered. Written in the first century AD, it purports to be the true account of the life of Jesus, as told by Youdas the sicarios - Judas Iscariot: the missing Gospel of Judas. If authentic, it will be one of the most incendiary documents in the history of humankind. The task of proving - or disproving - its validity falls to Father Leo Newman, one of the world's leading experts in Koine, the demotic Greek of the Roman E...

Sister Bernard has lived in a gray-stone convent in rural France for more than 70 years. In that time, a once youthful and lively cloister has gradually emptied, until only Bernard and two other nuns remain, a knot of survivors facing the creeping challenges of old age—ailing bodies and worn-thin friendships, slips of mind, and, in their most secret moments, slips of faith. Now, the halls will fall silent as the three women pack away their few possessions into wooden boxes, preparing to le...