Author: Robyn Cadwallader
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 1460702980
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
From a remarkable new Australian author comes THE ANCHORESS, a story set within the confines of a stone cell measuring seven paces by nine. Tiny in scope but universal in themes, it is a wonderful, wholly compelling fictional achievement. Set in the twelfth century, THE ANCHORESS tells the story of Sarah, only seventeen when she chooses to become an anchoress, a holy woman shut away in a small cell, measuring seven paces by nine, at the side of the village church. Fleeing the grief of losing a much-loved sister in childbirth and the pressure to marry, she decides to renounce the world, with all its dangers, desires and temptations, and to commit herself to a life of prayer and service to God. But as she slowly begins to understand, even the thick, unforgiving walls of her cell cannot keep the outside world away, and it is soon clear that Sarah's body and soul are still in great danger ... Telling an absorbing story of faith, desire, shame, fear and the very human need for connection and touch, THE ANCHORESS is both mesmerising and thrillingly unpredictable. 'Sarah's story is so beautiful, so rich, so strange, unexpected and thoughtful - also suspenseful. I loved this book.' Elizabeth Gilbert, author of EAT, PRAY, LOVE 'Robyn Cadwallader does the real work of historical fiction, creating a detailed, sensuous and richly imagined shard of the past. She has successfully placed her narrator, the anchoress, in that tantalizing, precarious, delicate realm: convincingly of her own distant era, yet emotionally engaging and vividly present to us in our own.' Geraldine Brooks 'An intense, atmospheric and very assured debut, this is one of the most eagerly anticipated novels of the year ... this one will appeal to readers who loved Hannah Kent's bestselling BURIAL RITES.' Caroline Baum 'Absorbing and finely structured .. surprisingly suspenseful ... The contemplative tone of this beautiful novel leaves behind a feeling of calm and restoration, and a deeper sense of the power of the written word.' Australian Book Review 'Cadwallader has chosen a rich subject, for while a story located in a single small room might sound claustrophobic, this is in fact what heightens Sarah's observations. It is precisely this limitation that drives the narrative - in the same way it does in Emma Donoghue's Room and Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl ... Cadwallader's writing evokes a heightened attention to the senses: you might never read a novel so sensuous yet unconcerned with romantic love. For this alone it is worth seeking out. But also because The Anchoress achieves what every historical novel attempts: reimagining the past while opening a new window - like a squint, perhaps - to our present lives.' Sydney Morning Herald 'Affecting ... finely drawn ... a considerable achievement.' Sarah Dunant, The New York Times The Anchoress was highly commended in the 2016 ACT Book of the Year Award, and winner of the People's Choice Award
Author: Thomas Matus
Publisher: Paulist Press
ISBN: 9780809137923
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
"In this book, Thomas Matus tells the true story of one woman's struggle to live her extraordinary vocation to a life of total silence, solitude and hiddenness. A gifted musician and ordinary Sunday Catholic, Nazarena, nee Julia Crotta, had a vision of Jesus calling her to the desert while in college in Connecticut. After much searching and numerous attempts to have her unique vocation recognized by the church, she eventually found her "desert" in a small room at the monastery of the Camaldolese Benedictine nuns in Rome. She lived there as an anchoress for forty-five years until her death in 1990." "Radical yet traditional, exceptional yet simple, Sister Nazarena had a long and spiritually fruitful ascetic life. Nazarena, an American Anchoress uses excerpts from her own letters of spiritual counseling and material taken from interviews with those who knew her to tell the remarkable story of her life of silence and prayer."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author: Julian (of Norwich)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Devotional literature
Languages : en
Pages : 526
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Book Description
Author: Hugh White
Publisher: Penguin Classics
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
Author: Sarah Blake
Publisher: Flatiron Books
ISBN: 1250110262
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 497
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Book Description
Instant New York Times Bestseller Longlisted for Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence 2020 New England Society Book Award Winner for Fiction “The Guest Book is monumental in a way that few novels dare attempt.” —The Washington Post The thought-provoking new novel by New York Times bestselling author Sarah Blake An exquisitely written, poignant family saga that illuminates the great divide, the gulf that separates the rich and poor, black and white, Protestant and Jew. Spanning three generations, The Guest Book deftly examines the life and legacy of one unforgettable family as they navigate the evolving social and political landscape from Crockett’s Island, their family retreat off the coast of Maine. Blake masterfully lays bare the memories and mistakes each generation makes while coming to terms with what it means to inherit the past.
Author: Anne Savage
Publisher: Paulist Press
ISBN: 9780809132577
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 516
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Book Description
Sometime in the first quarter of the 13th century a number of works were written for anchoresses, women who lived as religious recluses in cells adjoining churches. The most influential is Ancrene Wisse (A Guide for Anchoresses), which discusses in great detail the daily life of the anchoress, both outer and inner. This work gives a detailed sense of a powerful and multi-faceted spirituality different from that of other mystics.
Author: Robyn Cadwallader
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 1460707052
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
From Robyn Cadwallader, author of the internationally acclaimed novel The Anchoress, comes a deeply profound and moving novel of the importance of creativity and the power of connection, told through the story of the commissioning of a gorgeously decorated medieval manuscript, a Book of Hours. London, 1321: In a small shop in Paternoster Row, three people are drawn together around the creation of a magnificent book, an illuminated manuscript of prayers, a book of hours. Even though the commission seems to answer the aspirations of each one of them, their own desires and ambitions threaten its completion. As each struggles to see the book come into being, it will change everything they have understood about their place in the world. In many ways, this is a story about power - it is also a novel about the place of women in the roiling and turbulent world of the early fourteenth century; what power they have, how they wield it, and just how temporary and conditional it is. Rich, deep, sensuous and full of life, Book of Colours is also, most movingly, a profoundly beautiful story about creativity and connection, and our instinctive need to understand our world and communicate with others through the pages of a book. 'Robyn Cadwallader fashions words with the same delicate, colourful intensity that her 14th century illuminators brought to their illustrated manuscripts. Book of Colours brings alive a harsh but rich past, filled with the fantasies, fears, sly wit and tender longings of the medieval imagination.' Sarah Dunant 'Book of Colours shows the depth of possibility a book might hold - all the while shimmering with the beauty and fragility of an ancient gilded page.' Eleanor Limprecht 'Extraordinary ... a real sensory experience ... suffused with colours' ABC Radio National The Bookshelf Praise for The Anchoress: 'So beautiful, so rich, so strange, unexpected and thoughtful - also suspenseful. I loved this book.' Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love 'Affecting ... finely drawn ... a considerable achievement.' Sarah Dunant, New York Times 'Elegant and eloquent' Irish Mail 'Cadwallader's writing evokes a heightened attention to the senses: you might never read a novel so sensuous yet unconcerned with romantic love. For this alone it is worth seeking out. But also because The Anchoress achieves what every historical novel attempts: reimagining the past while opening a new window - like a squint, perhaps - to our present lives.' Sydney Morning Herald 'A novel of page-turning grace' Newtown Review of Books
Author: Catherine A. Davies
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441156542
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
Davies examines the work of four of the most important twentieth-century poets who have explored the epic tradition. Some of the poems display an explicit concern with ideas of American nationhood, while others emulate the formal ambitions and encyclopaedic scope of the epic poem. The study undertakes extensive close readings of Hart Crane's The Bridge (1930), Allen Ginsberg's ?Howl? (1956) and The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-71 (1972), James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), and John Ashbery's Flow Chart (1991). Although not primarily an account of a Whitmanian lineage, this book considers Whitman's renegotiation of the dialectic between the public and the private as a context for the project of the homosexual epic, arguing for the existence of a genealogy of epic poems that rethink the relationship between these two spheres. If, as Bakhtin suggests, the job of epic is to ?accomplish the task of cultural, national, and political centralization of the verbal-ideological world,? the idea of the ?homosexual epic? fundamentally problematizes the traditional aims of the genre.
Author: Elizabeth Scalia
Publisher: Ave Maria Press
ISBN: 159471357X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
Renowned in the blogosphere as The Anchoress and as Catholic Portal editor of the popular Patheos.com, Elizabeth Scalia offers a powerful critique of the “gods” we worship today, reminding readers that life’s deepest desires can be satisfied only in Christ. Strange Gods, Scalia's debut book, is packed full of the iconoclastic vim and vigor that has won her a large, faithful Internet following. She presents readers with a surprising look at the ways in which modern people still commit the sin of idolatry in their everyday lives. While literal golden calves no longer dot the landscape, Scalia describes how legitimate loves become obsessively twisted into idols. She unmasks idolatry in a number of everyday experiences—friendships that become needy or possessive, commitments political and religious that grow so intense they lead to hatred of others, to name a few—and points to the incarnation of Christ and authentic worship of him as a way out of idolatry and into peace, happiness, and love.
Author: Esta Spalding
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781852246044
Category : Persian Gulf War, 1991
Languages : en
Pages : 128
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Book Description
Awake before dawn a year after Helen's death, Peter begins to assemble memories of his lover. But how to conjure the dead? How to put a lover's body together again? In his laboratory Peter is restoring the skeleton of a whale. But in his notebook, he scrawls pieces of Helen's story and of their story together. Slowly, he begins to see the secret tunnels between Helen'sdeath and the deaths of her parents, between Helen's loyalty to her sister and her passion for right action.A sensual, haunting book-length poem by a highly original Canadian writer, Anchoress moves gracefully from the painted caves of Vichy France where Helen's mother is born, to the banks of the Seine where her parents meet; from a foster home in Illinois to the greystone university buildings where Helen becomes obsessed with the televised events of the Gulf War. This remarkable book challenges the way we think about the boundaries between politics and passion, war and love, fiction and poetry.
