This feature allows you to read the first chapter of a new book. By Mark Salzman Knopf.
Clean lines look especially good in an age of flouncy postmodern narratives.
Sister John had come prepared to hear bad news about her health, but not about the state of her soul. . . . Doctors and clergy alike had referred to the disease for centuries as 'holy madness' . . . Sister John fears that, without the ecstatic experience of God, the Great Silence of the cloister will be deafening. Here he makes his most overt attempt yet to get to the heart of the matter, examining the roots, flowering and subsiding of a religious crisis. Bare it surely is, like the Carmelite Sisters' larder.