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An unforgettable spiritual autobiography about a search for meaning that begins alongside one of the great religious icons of our time and ends with a return to the secular world. Provocative, profound, emotionally charged, and sure to be controversial, the book presents a rare, privileged view of Mother Teresa while being a unique and magnificent memoir of self-discovery.

It is the year of Our Lord's grace 1431, and the nuns of England's St. Frideswide sweetly chant their Paternosters behind gracious, trellised walls. But their quiet lives are shattered by the unwelcome visit of the hard-drinking, blaspheming dowager Lady Ermentrude, with her retinue of lusty maids and men, baying hounds, and even a pet monkey in tow. The lady demands wine, a feast, and her niece, the frail and saintly novice Thomasine.

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Judi Dench: the heartbreaking true story of an Irishwoman and the secret she kept for 50 years When she became pregnant as a teenager in Ireland in 1952, Philomena Lee was sent to a convent to be looked after as a “fallen woman.” Then the nuns took her baby from her and sold him, like thousands of others, to America for adoption. Fifty years later, Philomena decided to find him. Meanwhile, on the other...

In the summer of 1144, a strange calm has settled over England. The armies of King Stephen & Empress Maud, the two royal cousins contending for the throne, have temporarily exhausted each other. On the whole, Brother Cadfael considers peace a blessing & agrees to accompany a friend to Wales. When Cadfael is captured by an army of Danish mercenaries, he finds himself in the midst of a brotherly quarrel that could plunge an entire kingdom into deadly...

Collection of Mother Teresa's writing and reflections, almost all of which have never been made public before, sheds light on Mother Teresa's interior life in a way that reveals the depth and intensity of her holiness for the first time. A moving chronicle of her spiritual journey--including moments, indeed years, of utter desolation--these letters reveal the secrets she shared only with her closest confidants. She emerges as a classic mystic whose...

In the midst of a twelfth-century civil war between King Stephen and Empress Maud, a hostage exchange is put in jeopardy when one of the prisoners dies, and Brother Cadfael determines that he was murdered.

It is Christmas, A.D. 1141, Abbot Radulfus returns from London, bringing with him a priest for the vacant living of Holy Cross, also known as the Foregate. The new priest is a man of presence, learning, and discipline, but he lacks humility and the common touch. When he is found drowned in the millpond, suspicion is cast upon a young man who arrived with the priest's train and was sent to work in Brother Cadfael's garden. Indeed, he is soon discovered...