Fiction featuring true holiness
Discover inspiring fiction books featuring true holiness. Explore captivating stories of faith, virtue, and divine journeys in this curated list of spiritually uplifting reads.
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Peace Like a River
by Leif Enger
A bag with ten copies of the title that may also include miscellaneous notes, discussion questions, biographical information, and reading lists to assist book group discussion leaders.
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Green Dolphin Street
by Elizabeth Goudge
The lives of sisters Marianne and Marguerite take very unexpected courses when William, the man they both adore, writes after a ten year absence and asks for Marianne's hand in marriage, even though it is Marguerite he has always loved.
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Father Elijah
by Michael David O'Brien
Father Elijah, a Holocaust survivor and convert to Catholicism from Judaism, travels through Europe and the Middle East on a papal mission to find a man who may be the Antichrist and induce him to repent.
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The Novice's Tale
by Margaret Frazer
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. What she gets is her own strange and sudden death. Sister Frevisse, hosteler of the priory and amateur sleuth, fears murder. The most likely suspect is pious Thomasine . . . but Frevisse alone detects a clever web spun to entangle an innocent nun in the most unholy of passions—and the deadliest of deeds.
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In this House of Brede
by Rumer Godden
"A novel of sensitive dedication." --"The Atlantic Monthly" "Rumer Godden deals precisely with the theme of the religious life . . . as representing 'the heart of holiness of the Church.' It is at once a life of great peace and often equally intense struggle." --"America" magazine This extraordinarily sensitive and insightful portrait of religious life centers on Philippa Talbot, a highly successful professional woman who leaves her life among the London elite to join a cloistered Benedictine community. In this gripping narrative of the crises surrounding the ancient Brede abbey, Rumer Godden penetrates to the mysterious, inner heart of a religious community--a place of complexity and conflict, as well as joy and love. It is a place where Philippa, to her own surprise and her friends' astonishment, finds her life by losing it.
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Lying Awake
by Mark Salzman
Mark Salzman's Lying Awake is a finely wrought gem that plumbs the depths of one woman's soul, and in so doing raises salient questions about the power-and price-of faith. Sister John's cloistered life of peace and prayer has been electrified by ever more frequent visions of God's radiance, leading her toward a deep religious ecstasy. Her life and writings have become examples of devotion. Yet her visions are accompanied by shattering headaches that compel Sister John to seek medical help. When her doctor tells her an illness may be responsible for her gift, Sister John faces a wrenching choice: to risk her intimate glimpses of the divine in favor of a cure, or to continue her visions with the knowledge that they might be false-and might even cost her her life.