ESSENE is about daily life in a Benedictine monastery and the resolution of conflict between personal needs and the institutional and organizational priorities of the community. In the Order, where the focus of life is the relationship of individual work and worship to the community as a whole, the brethren must cope with the same issues that arise in any community: rules, work, worship, values, love, and play.

In this beautiful story of adventure and survival from the New York Times bestselling author of Room, three men vow to leave the world behind them as they set out in a small boat for an island their leader has seen in a dream, with only faith to guide them. In seventh-century Ireland, a scholar and priest called Artt has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks--young Trian and old Cormac--he rows down the river Shannon...

"We shall all, in the end, be led to where we belong. We shall all, in the end, find our way home. In a time of war, a mysterious child appears at the monastery of the Order of the Chronicles of Sorrowing. Gentle Brother Edik finds the girl, Beatryce, curled in a stall, wracked with fever, coated in dirt and blood, and holding fast to the ear of Answelica the goat. As the monk nurses Beatryce to health, he uncovers her dangerous secret, one that imperils...

The first novel in the Matthew Shardlake Tudor Mystery series—the inspiration for the Hulu original series Shardlake!
Dissolution is an utterly riveting portrayal of Tudor England. The year is 1537, and the country is divided between those faithful to the Catholic Church and those loyal to the king and the newly established Church of England. When a royal commissioner is brutally murdered in a monastery on the south coast...

"#1 New York Times bestselling thriller writer Kathy Reichs returns with her twenty-first novel of suspense featuring forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan who, after receiving a box containing a human eyeball, uncovers a series of gruesome killings eerily reenacting the most shocking of her prior cases."-- Winter has come to North Carolina and, with it, a drop in crime. Freed from a heavy work schedule, Tempe Brennan is content to dote on her...

Following a plane crash in the Himalayan mountains, a lost group of Englishmen and Americans stumble upon the dream-like, utopian world of Shangri-La, where life is eternal and civilization refined.

"Monk's Medicine is a quest for ancient and proven wisdom and practices - a pilgrimage to ten monasteries around the world, from the roots of monasticism at a Coptic monastery in the eastern desert of Egypt to Assisi, Greece, Bhutan Montserrat and more. We follow Sarah Sands on her personal journey as she identifies common characteristics from centuries of monastic life and how they can take us beyond the self-absorption of many contemporary self-help...

"The grandson of Prince Genji lives outside of space and time and wanders the grounds of an old monastery in Kyoto. The monastery, too, is timeless: a place of prayer and deliverance, with barely a trace of any human presence. The wanderer is searching for a garden that has long captivated him: "he continu- ally saw the garden in his mind's eye without being able to touch its existence." This exquisitely beautiful novel by National Book Award-winner...

This is the story of a monk and his journalist former lover traveling through Europe's monasteries and discovering meaning of life and love. "I can't have Elijah Iverson. I can't have him because he's my older brother's best friend. I can't have him because I broke his heart five years ago; because he's now engaged to someone else-someone kind and dependable who deserves his whiskey eyes, his soft mouth, his fierce intellect. I can't have Elijah...