Grandmother And The Priests

New York Times Bestseller: In Victorian Britain, an affluent woman hosts a group of Catholic priests in her home—and listens as they tell their stories. Rose, a young girl visiting her grandmother, sits among eleven priests from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. As each guest shares the most challenging moments of their vocations, tests of faith that have brought them face-to-face with the miseries, temptations, and evils that lurk beyond the peaceful confines of the rectory, their worldly, wealthy hostess and her granddaughter come to learn the struggles and outcomes of these confrontations with the human condition. “The priests themselves represent a mixed lot—men of exalted backgrounds, culture, worldly experience, who have found their hardest task bringing themselves down to the humble people of their flocks; men who understand only the intellectual, realistic aspects of their faith—and must learn to accept the mystical as well; men who hide their saintliness under uncouth exteriors, who learn the hard way to love their fellow men, who encounter devils as well as saints, murderers, sinners. . . . Lively reading.” —Kirkus Reviews

Novel about eleven encounters with the miraculous in the British Isles, told to a little girl and her worldly Irish grandmother by a circle of priests.

"An unforgettable work of art."—The National Post Saul Indian Horse is dying. Tucked away in a hospice high above the clash and clang of a big city, he embarks on a marvellous journey of imagination back through the life he led as a northern Ojibway, with all its sorrows and joys. With compassion and insight, author Richard Wagamese traces through his fictional characters the decline of a culture and a cultural way. For Saul, taken forcibly from the land and his family when he's sent to residential school, salvation comes for a while through his incredible gifts as a hockey player. But in the harsh realities of 1960s Canada, he battles obdurate racism and the spirit-destroying effects of cultural alienation and displacement. Indian Horse unfolds against the bleak loveliness of northern Ontario, all rock, marsh, bog and cedar. Wagamese writes with a spare beauty, penetrating the heart of a remarkable Ojibway man. Drawing on his great-grandfather's mystical gift of vision, Saul Indian Horse comes to recognize the influence of everyday magic on his own life. In this wise and moving novel, Richard Wagamese shares that gift of magic with readers as well.

Mimi Bull grew up secure in the love of family, friends, and neighbors, never questioning the unusual circumstances that caused her to be adopted by two women in the late 1930s. It was years before she learned the secret truth: that one of the women was her grandmother, the other her biological mother, and that the story of her adoption had been concocted not only to shield her mother's reputation, but to hide the fact that her father was the gregarious young parish priest everyone adored. It has only been very recently that the Catholic Church has begun to acknowledge the existence of other children of priests, and Bull writes candidly of the emotional toll that this policy of secrecy and denial took on her--"I should like to have lived a life with my loving parents, knowing who we all were, knowing my father's family from the beginning, and without the forty years of depression that compromised me and those I loved."

The Old Priest is a book of transformations. From the cigar-smoke-and-mirrors world of casino life, to the collection’s title character morphing into a goat-man before the narrator’s eyes, to a family drama upended by a miniature dinosaur in the backyard, Anthony Wallace writes about life-changing events. The characters seek to escape their earthly boundaries through artifice and fantasy, and those boundaries can be as elegant and fragile as a martini glass or as hardscrabble as an Indian reservation. In these eight vividly detailed short stories we encounter cheating husbands, neurotic housewives, out-of-control teenagers, desperate gamblers, deluded alcoholics, and a host of others who would like a chance at something more. Some face the consequences of their actions, while others simply begin to see what they’ve been missing all along. Through wry, ironic prose—and what feels like firsthand experience—Wallace describes a comic and often misguided search for self-knowledge in the most unlikely locations—like the Emerald City, a low-rent gambling den where a cocktail waitress dressed as an X-rated Dorothy offers gamblers more than a Scotch on the rocks; or the Bastille Hotel-Casino, where a dealer dressed as an eighteenth century footman deals five-dollar blackjack to a reminiscing Holocaust survivor. Occasionally a real demon appears, but the collection is mostly about personal demons and the possibility of exorcising them. The stories in The Old Priest have to do with time and memory, and they convincingly open out beyond ordinary daily time to reveal something else—the present moment, perhaps, but a larger, more mysterious conception of it.

Looks at the life and work of the provocative Catholic social reformer from the personal point of view of someone who knew her well, her granddaughter.

From the internationally celebrated author of The Master, winner of the 2006 International Dublin Literary Award. Mothers and Sons is a deeply penetrating and beautifully written meditation on the dramas surrounding this most elemental of relationships. Each of the nine stories focuses on a moment in which an unspoken balance shifts; in which a mother or son do battle, or experience a sudden crisis, thus leaving their conception of who they are subtly or seriously altered. A son buries his mother and goes out to a drug-fuelled rave on a remote beach near Dublin. A mother sings about treacherous love to a rapt crowd of musicians in a local pub. And in “A Long Winter,” Colm Tóibín’s finest piece of fiction to date, a man goes searching for his mother in the snow-covered Pyrenees. Psychologically intricate and emotionally incisive, each finely wrought story teases out the delicate and difficult strands woven between mothers and sons. This is an acute, masterful, and moving collection that confirms Tóibín as a great prose stylist of our time.

Father Tony should have never been a priest. With the family money, he could have pursued his interest in literature or worked with young boys-only free of all those Church strictures. But there was no priest in the family, so when his immigrant grandmother beheld a peculiar mark on his newborn head and declared it a sign from God, his destiny was set. But those marked by God are often marked by men as well: Tony's jealous uncle will never forgive him for finding favor with the old woman. And with his ties to the city's Catholic hierarchy, he'll plot to destroy his nephew if it takes forever.