Thursday, 28 November 2019
Wednesday, 27 November 2019
Life of St Anthony of Egypt by St Athanasius of Alexandria
Paperback: The biographic text of St Anthony is presented in this complete, unabridged edition for the reader's absorption and contemplation.
First published in the fourth century AD, Anthony the Great's biography was authored by Christian Saint Athanasius of Alexandria. Since its original release, the book has helped spread the beliefs, practices and arduous faith of Anthony the Great to a wider audience.
A significant progenitor of the monastic tradition, Saint Anthony lived an ascetic lifestyle in the deserts of Egypt. Although not the earliest of religious figures committed to this tradition, through his actions and preaching Anthony helped popularise and spread principles that would contribute heavily to the establishment of Christian monastic orders in Europe and beyond.
One famous event in St Anthony's life was his encounter with the supernatural in the remote reaches of the Egyptian desert. This occurrence, wherein the otherworldly presence tried to tempt him away from his spartan philosophy of living, has experienced much coverage in Western art and literature.
The translation to English contained in this edition is by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, both theologians who held Anthony the Great in high esteem.
This translation of Life of St Anthony of Egypt was first published in 1892.
About the author: St Athanasius, also called Saint Athanasius of Alexandria or Saint Athanasius the Apostolic, (born c. 293, Alexandria - died May 2, 373, Alexandria) is a theologian, ecclesiastical statesman, Egyptian national leader and doctor of the church. He was the chief defender of Christian orthodoxy in the 4th-century battle against Arianism, the heresy that the Son of God was a creature of like, but not of the same, substance as God the Father. His important works include The Life of St. Anthony, On the Incarnation, and Four Orations Against the Arians.
Murder on the Champ de Mars (Aimée Leduc Series) by Cara Black
Paperback: Paris, February 1998: Aimée Leduc has her work cut out for her - running her detective agency and fighting off sleep deprivation as she tries to be a good single mother to her new bebe. The last thing she has time for now is to take on a personal investigation for a poor manouche (French Gypsy) boy. But he insists his dying mother has an important secret she needs to tell Aimée, something to do with Aimée's father's unsolved murder a decade ago. How can she say no?
The dying woman's secret is even more dangerous than her son realized. When Aimée arrives at the hospital, the boy's mother has disappeared. She was far too sick to leave on her own - she must have been abducted. What does she know that is so important it is worth killing for? And will Aimée be able to find her before it is too late and the medication keeping her alive runs out?
Set in the seventh arrondissment, the quartier of the Parisian elite, Murder on the Champ de Mars takes us from the highest seats of power in the ministries and embassies through the city's private gardens and the homes of France's oldest aristocratic families. Aimée discovers more connections than she thought possible between the clandestine Gypsy world and the moneyed ancient regime, ultimately leading her to the truth behind her father's death.
After all, for Aimée, murder is never far from home.
Murder on the Champ de Mars (2015) is the fifteenth instalment in the excellent and enthralling PI Aimée Leduc series set in Paris, France.
About the author: Cara Black is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of 18 books in the Private Investigator Aimée Leduc series, which is set in Paris. Cara has received multiple nominations for the Anthony and Macavity Awards, a Washington Post Book World Book of the Year citation, the Médaille de la Ville de Paris - the Paris City Medal, which is awarded in recognition of contribution to international culture - and invitations to be the Guest of Honour at conferences such as the Paris Polar Crime Festival and Left Coast Crime. With more than 400,000 books in print, the Aimée Leduc series has been translated into German, Norwegian, Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew.
Cara was born in Chicago but has lived in California’s Bay Area since she was five years old.
Her love of all things French was kindled by the French-speaking nuns at her Catholic high school, where Cara first encountered French literature and went crazy for the work of Prix Goncourt winner Romain Gary. Her junior year in high school, she wrote him a fan letter - which he answered, and which inspired her to make her first trip to Paris, where her idol took her out for coffee and a cigar. Since then, she has been to Paris many, many times. On each visit she entrenches herself in a different part of the city, learning its secret history. She has posed as a journalist to sneak into closed areas, trained at a firing range with real Paris flics, gotten locked in a bathroom at the Victor Hugo museum, and - just like Aimée - gone down into the sewers with the rats (she can never pass up an opportunity to see something new, even when the timing isn’t ideal - she was headed to a fancy dinner right afterwards and had a spot of bother with her shoes). For the scoop on real Paris crime, she takes the flics out for drinks and dinner to hear their stories - but it usually turns into a long evening, which is why she sticks with espresso.
Rating: 5/5
Many Rivers To Cross (An Alan Banks Crime Novel Series) by Peter Robinson
Hardback: The iconic DCI Banks is called into action for the twenty-sixth time in this breathlessly plotted double murder mystery involving immigration, drugs and gangland violence. Nobody can touch Robinson when it comes to scalpel-sharp police procedurals and Many Rivers to Cross is one of his very best. (Waterstones)
A skinny young boy is found dead - his body carelessly stuffed into wheelie bin. Detective Superintendent Alan Banks and his team are called to investigate. Who is the boy, and where did he come from? Was he discarded as rubbish, or left as a warning to someone? He looks Middle Eastern, but no one on the East Side Estate has seen him before.
As the local press seize upon an illegal immigrant angle, and the national media the story of another stabbing, the police are called to investigate a less newsworthy death: a middle-aged heroin addict found dead of an overdose in another estate, scheduled for redevelopment.
Banks finds the threads of each case seem to be connected to the other, and to the dark side of organised crime in Eastvale. Does another thread link to his friend Zelda, who is facing her own dark side? The truth may be more complex - or much simpler - than it seems.
Many Rivers To Cross (2019) is the twenty-sixth book in the masterful and superb Alan Banks crime novel series set in Yorkshire, England.
About the author: British by birth, crime novelist Peter Robinson moved to Canada after university and now divides his time between his home county of Yorkshire and Toronto. His first novel, Gallows View (1987), introduced his iconic series lead Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks and became the first novel in an enduringly popular series. Now running to 26 novels, the series - which celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2017 - has also inspired a popular television adaptation, DCI Banks, starring Stephen Tomkinson. He has also written two collections of short stories and three standalone novels, the most recent of which is the Number One bestseller Before The Poison (2011). The critically acclaimed crime novels have won numerous awards in Britain, the US, Canada and Europe, and are published in translation all over the world.
Rating: 5/5
Lies, Lies, Lies by Adele Parks
Paperback: Lies. They can make you. They can break you.
Daisy and Simon's marriage is great, isn't it?
After years together, the arrival of longed-for daughter Millie sealed everything in place. A happy little family of three.
And so what if Simon drinks a bit too much sometimes - Daisy's used to it, she knows he's letting off steam. Until one night at a party things spiral horribly out of control. And that happy little family of three will never be the same again.
In Lies, Lies, Lies (2019) Sunday Times bestseller Adele Parks explores the darkest corners of a relationship in freefall in a mesmerising tale of marriage and secrets.
Prolific, Adele has published nineteen novels in nineteen years, including Game Over, Tell Me Something and Love Lies, and all nineteen of her novels have been bestsellers. She has sold over three and a half million copies of her work in the UK but also sells throughout the world. Her books are translated into twenty-six languages. She has written numerous articles and short stories for many magazines and newspapers and often appears on radio and TV talking about her work.
She is an Ambassador for the National Literacy Trust and The Reading Agency's Six Book Challenge, a scheme that encourages emerging adult readers who are becoming passionate about books. In 2008, she wrote a Quick Read, Happy Families as part of the celebrations of World Book Day, which went on to win Quick Read Learners’ Favourite Award, as voted for by the public. Adele is also a judge for the Costa Book Awards and The British Book Awards.
All her novels examines issues that are important to us all. She likes to scrutinize concepts of family, theories on love, parenting and fidelity. Whatever period she sets her novels, she is known for examining the thorny issues of the lives people lead with her trademark, up-front, tell-it-as-it-is style.
In 2010 she was awarded an honorary doctorate of Letters from Teesside University. Adele has spent her adult life in Italy, Botswana and London, up until two years ago when she moved to Guildford, Surrey where she now lives with her husband, teenage son and cat.
Rating: 5/5
Tuesday, 26 November 2019
Monday, 25 November 2019
The Cold Summer (Pietro Fenoglio Series) by Gianrico Carofiglio
Paperback: The summer of 1992 had been exceptionally cold in southern Italy. But that is not the reason why it is still remembered.
On May 23, 1992, a roadside explosion killed the Palermo judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three police officers. A few weeks later judge Paolo Borsellino and five police officers were killed in the center of Palermo. These anti-mafia judges became heroes but the violence spread to the region of Bari in Puglia, where we meet a new, memorable character, Maresciallo Pietro Fenoglio, an officer of the Italian Carabinieri.
Fenoglio, recently abandoned by his wife, must simultaneously deal with his personal crisis and the new gang wars raging around Bari. The police are stymied until a gang member, accused of killing a child, decides to collaborate, revealing the inner workings and the rules governing organised crime in the area.
The story is narrated through the actual testimony of the informant, a trope reminiscent of verbatim theatre which Carofiglio, an former anti-mafia judge himself, uses to great effect. The gangs are stopped but the mystery of the boy's murder must still be solved, leading Fenoglio into a world of deep moral ambiguity, where the prosecutors are hard to distinguish from the prosecuted.
The Cold Summer (2018, English translation) is the debut novel in the highly recommended Officer Pietro Fenoglio series set in Bari, Puglia, southern Italy.
The Cold Summer is translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis.
About the author: Award-winning, best-selling novelist Gianrico Carofiglio was born in Bari in 1961 and worked for many years as a prosecutor specializing in organized crime. He was appointed advisor of the anti-Mafia committee in the Italian parliament in 2007 and served as a senator from 2008 to 2013. Carofiglio is best known for the Guido Guerrieri crime series: Involuntary Witness, A Walk in the Dark, Reasonable Doubts, Temporary Perfections and A Fine Line, all published by Bitter Lemon Press. His other novels include The Silence of the Wave. Carofiglio’s books have sold more than four million copies in Italy and have been translated into twenty-four languages worldwide.
Rating: 5/5
Sunday, 24 November 2019
Saturday, 23 November 2019
Thursday, 21 November 2019
Wednesday, 20 November 2019
Manifest Justice: The True Story of a Convicted Murderer and the Lawyers Who Fought for His Freedom (Law) by Barry Siegel
Hardback: Manifest Justice (2012) is about a 40-year fight for freedom.
In this remarkable legal page-turner, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Barry Siegel recounts the dramatic, decades-long saga of Bill Macumber, imprisoned for thirty-eight years for a double homicide he denies committing. In the spring of 1962, a school bus full of students stumbled across a mysterious crime scene on an isolated stretch of Arizona desert: an abandoned car and two bodies.
This brutal murder of a young couple bewildered the sheriff 's department of Maricopa County for years. Despite a few promising leads - including several chilling confessions from Ernest Valenzuela, a violent repeat offender - the case went cold. More than a decade later, a clerk in the sheriff 's department, Carol Macumber, came forward to tell police that her estranged husband had confessed to the murders. Though the evidence linking Bill Macumber to the incident was questionable, he was arrested and charged with the crime. During his trial, the judge refused to allow the confession of now-deceased Ernest Valenzuela to be admitted as evidence in part because of the attorney-client privilege. Bill Macumber was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
The case, rife with extraordinary irregularities, attracted the sustained involvement of the Arizona Justice Project, one of the first and most respected of the non-profit groups that represent victims of manifest injustice across the country. With more twists and turns than a Hollywood movie, Macumber's story illuminates startling, upsetting truths about our justice system, which kept a possibly innocent man locked up for almost forty years, and introduces readers to the generations of dedicated lawyers who never stopped working on his behalf, lawyers who ultimately achieved stunning results.
With precise journalistic detail, intimate access and masterly storytelling, Barry Siegel will change your understanding of American jurisprudence, police procedure, and what constitutes justice in our country today.
About the author: Barry Siegel is a former national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times who won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2002 for his piece "A Father's Pain, a Judge's Duty, and a Justice Beyond Their Reach". He is an expert on literary journalism and was recruited by the University of California, Irvine to chair that school's new English program in Literary Journalism. Siegel is the author of the influential true crime novel, A Death in White Bear Lake, which is considered by many to be a seminal document regarding child abuse. Barry Siegel lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Marti Devore.
Tuesday, 19 November 2019
Gorky Park (Arkady Renko Series) by Martin Cruz Smith
Paperback: Three bodies found frozen in the snow. And the hunt for the killer begins.
It begins with a triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen in the snow, faces and fingers missing. Chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko is brilliant, sensitive, honest, and cynical about everything except his profession. To identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle the KGB, FBI, and the New York City police as he pursues a rich, ruthless, and well-connected American fur dealer. Meanwhile, Renko is falling in love with a beautiful, headstrong dissident for whom he may risk everything.
A wonderfully textured, vivid look behind the Iron Curtain, Gorky Park (1981) is a tense, atmospheric, and memorable crime story.
Gorky Park is the first instalment in the Chief Investigator Arkady Renko series set in Russia. There are nine books in this excellent series.
Rating: 3/5
Monday, 18 November 2019
Tuesday, 12 November 2019
Murder in Pigalle (Aimée Leduc Investigation Series) by Cara Black
Paperback: June, 1998: Paris’s sticky summer heat is even more oppressive than usual as rowdy French football fans riot in anticipation of the World Cup. Private investigator Aimée Leduc has been trying to slow down her hectic lifestyle - she is five months pregnant and has the baby’s well-being to think about now.
But then disaster strikes close to home. A serial rapist has been terrorizing Paris’s Pigalle neighborhood, following teenage girls home and attacking them in their own houses. Zazie, the 13-year-old daughter of the proprietor of Aimée’s favourite café, has disappeared. The police aren’t mobilizing quickly enough, and when Zazie’s desperate parents approach Aimée for help, she knows she couldn’t say no even if she wanted to.
Murder in Pigalle (2014) is Cara Black’s fashionable Parisian PI Aimée Leduc fourteenth adventure and five months pregnant.
Cara was born in Chicago but has lived in California’s Bay Area since she was five years old.
Her love of all things French was kindled by the French-speaking nuns at her Catholic high school, where Cara first encountered French literature and went crazy for the work of Prix Goncourt winner Romain Gary. Her junior year in high school, she wrote him a fan letter - which he answered, and which inspired her to make her first trip to Paris, where her idol took her out for coffee and a cigar. Since then, she has been to Paris many, many times. On each visit she entrenches herself in a different part of the city, learning its secret history. She has posed as a journalist to sneak into closed areas, trained at a firing range with real Paris flics, gotten locked in a bathroom at the Victor Hugo museum, and - just like Aimée - gone down into the sewers with the rats (she can never pass up an opportunity to see something new, even when the timing isn’t ideal - she was headed to a fancy dinner right afterwards and had a spot of bother with her shoes). For the scoop on real Paris crime, she takes the flics out for drinks and dinner to hear their stories - but it usually turns into a long evening, which is why she sticks with espresso.
Rating: 5/5
Saturday, 9 November 2019
Singapore Noir Edited by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
Paperback: From the Introduction by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan:
"Say Singapore to anyone and you'll likely hear one of a few words: Caning. Fines. Chewing gum.
For much of the West, the narrative of Singapore - a modern Southeast Asian city-state perched on an island on the tip of the Malay Peninsula - has been marked largely by its government's strict laws and unwavering enforcement of them. As much as I understand these outside viewpoints, I have always lamented that the quirky and dark complexities of my native country's culture rarely seem to make it past its borders.
Beneath its sparkling veneer is a country teeming with shadows. And its stories remain. The rich stories that attracted literary lions W Somerset Maugham and Rudyard Kipling to hold court at the Raffles Hotel (where the Singapore Sling was created) are still sprinkled throughout its neighbourhoods. And in the following pages, you'll get the chance to discover some of them.
You'll find stories from some of the best contemporary writers in Singapore - three of them winners of the Singapore Literature Prize, essentially the country's Pulitzer: Simon Tay, writing as Donald Tee Quee Ho, tells the story of a hard-boiled detective who inadvertently wends his way into the underbelly of organized crime, Colin Cheong shows us a surprising side to the country's ubiquitous cheerful 'taxi uncle,' while Suchen Christine Lim spins a wistful tale of a Chinese temple medium whose past resurges to haunt her.
As for mine, I chose a setting close to my heart - the kelongs, or old fisheries on stilts, that once dotted the waters of Singapore but are gradually disappearing. I have a deep sense of romance about these kelongs, along with the many other settings, characters, nuances, and quirks that you'll see in these stories. They're intense, inky, nebulous. There is evil, sadness, a foreboding. And liars, cheaters, the valiant abound.
This is a Singapore rarely explored in Western literature until now. No Disneyland here; but there is a death penalty."
About the editor/author: Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is a New York City-based food and fashion writer whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, InStyle, Marie Claire, Every Day with Rachael Ray, Family Circle, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and many other outlets.
She is a regular contributor to the Atlantic Food Channel. Born and raised in Singapore, Tan graduated from Northwestern University and completed two residencies at Yaddo, the artists colony. Tan is the author of A Tiger in the Kitchen (2011) and Sarong Party Girls (2016).
Follow her at: twitter.com/cheryltan88.
Rating: 5/5
Wednesday, 6 November 2019
Confessions Of A Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
Hardback: Tuesday, 29 December. "Do you have a list of your books, or do I just have to stare at them?"
Monday, 13 April. A man approached me as I was pricing up stock and asked, "I wonder if you can help me, I'm looking for self-help books." I'm almost certain that he failed to see the irony, so I asked him what sort of self-help books he was looking for, to which he replied, "I don't know."
Saturday, 9 May. A very elderly man, walking using two sticks to help him get about, bought a copy of a book called 'Advanced Sex: Explicit Positions for Explosive Lovemaking'.
Shaun Bythell is the owner of The Bookshop, Scotland's largest second-hand bookshop, in Wigtown, Scotland. But if you think his days are taken up with sorting through rare and valuable first editions, snoozing by the fire with the latest literary gem, or chatting with interesting, well-informed readers, think again.
Bookselling, Shaun reveals in his sequel to the bestselling The Diary of a Bookseller (2017), is far from the idyll you might imagine. Beset by bizarre requests from customers who appear not to know what a shop is, locked in an endless struggle with Amazon and terrorised by his bin-diving, poultice-making employees, Shaun documents his trials and tribulations with a sharp eye and even sharper wit.
This the inside story of a life lived in books: from the pleasures of the unexpected find to the friendships forged over shared tastes and the sadness of finishing a really good book, Confessions of a Bookseller (2019) will delight and inform until the very last page.
About the author: Shaun Bythell bought The Bookshop in Wigtown on 1 November 2001 and has been running it ever since with an increasing passion for the business, matched only by a sense of despair for its future, and an ill-humour inspired by a decade-and-a-half of dealing with confused customers and surly staff. He is also one of the organisers of the Wigtown Festival.
His first book, The Diary of a Bookseller, was sold into twenty-three languages including Russian, Korean, Arabic and French and has been optioned for a television series.
Rating: 5/5
The Cruellest Month (Chief Inspector Gamache Series) by Louise Penny
Paperback: Welcome to Three Pines, where the cruellest month is about to deliver on its threat.
It is spring in the tiny, forgotten village; buds are on the trees and the first flowers are struggling through the newly thawed earth. But not everything is meant to return to life.
When some villagers decide to celebrate Easter with a séance at the Old Hadley House, they are hoping to rid the town of its evil - until one of their party dies of fright. Was this a natural death, or was the victim somehow helped along?
Brilliant, compassionate Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec is called to investigate, in a case that will force him to face his own ghosts as well as those of a seemingly idyllic town where relationships are far more dangerous than they seem.
The Cruellest Month (2007) is the third book in the traditional Chief Inspector Gamache series set in a remote village in Canada.
The Cruellest Month won the Agatha Award (Best Novel) and was nominated the Best Novel by the Anthony, Barry and Macavity Awards respectively.
About the author: Louise Penny is the Number One New York Times bestselling author of the Inspector Gamache series, including Still Life, which won the CWA John Creasey Dagger in 2006. Recipient of virtually every existing award for crime fiction, Louise was also granted The Order of Canada in 2014 and received an honorary doctorate of literature from Carleton University and the Ordre Nationale du Québec in 2017. She lives in a small village south of Montreal.
Rating: 5/5
Monday, 4 November 2019
The Fallen Angel (Gabriel Allon Series) by Daniel Silva
Paperback: When last we encountered Gabriel Allon in Portrait of a Spy (2011), he was pitted in a blood-soaked duel with a deadly network of jihadist terrorists. Now, exposed and war-weary, he has returned to his beloved Rome to restore a Caravaggio masterpiece for the Vatican.
But while working early one morning in the conservation laboratory, Gabriel is summoned to Saint Peter's Basilica by his friend and occasional ally Monsignor Luigi Donati, the all-powerful private secretary to his Holiness Pope Paul VII. The body of a beautiful woman lies smashed and broken beneath Michelangelo's magnificent dome. The Vatican police rule the death a suicidal fall, though Gabriel, with his restorer's eye and flawless memory, suspects otherwise. So, it seems, does the monsignor. Concerned about a potential scandal, Donati fears a public inquiry will inflict more wounds on an already-damaged Church; he calls upon Gabriel to use his matchless talents and experience to quietly pursue the truth - with one important caveat.
"Rule number one at the Vatican," Donati said. "Don't ask too many questions."
Gabriel soon discovers that the dead woman had uncovered a dangerous secret - a secret that threatens powers beyond the Vatican. To solve the mystery, Gabriel joins forces with a master art thief to penetrate a criminal smuggling network that is looting timeless treasures of antiquity and selling them to the highest bidder. But there is more to this network than just greed. An old enemy is plotting revenge, an unthinkable act of sabotage that will plunge the world into a conflict of apocalyptic proportions. Once again Gabriel must return to the ranks of his old intelligence service - and place himself, and those he holds dear, on the razor's edge of danger.
An intoxicating blend of art and intrigue, The Fallen Angel (2012) moves swiftly from the private chambers of the Vatican, to a glamorous art gallery in St Moritz, to the hidden alleyways of Istanbul - and finally, to a pulse-pounding climax in the ancient city of Jerusalem, the world's most sacred and contested parcel of land. Each setting is rendered with the care of an Old Master, as are the spies, lovers, priests, and thieves who inhabit its pages. It is a story of faith and of the destructive power of secrets. And it is an all-too-timely reminder that those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.
The Fallen Angel won the Barry Awards in the best thriller category in 2013. The Fallen Angel is the twelfth instalment in the superb and well-crafted Gabriel Allon series.
About the author: Daniel Silva was born in Michigan in 1960 and raised in California where he received his BA from Fresno State. Silva began his writing career as a journalist for United Press International (UPI), traveling in the Middle East and covering the Iran-Iraq war, terrorism and political conflicts. From UPI he moved to CNN, where he eventually became executive producer of its Washington-based public policy programming. In 1994, he began work on his first novel, The Unlikely Spy, a surprise best seller that won critical acclaim. He turned to writing full time in 1997 and all of his books have been New York Times/national best sellers, translated into 25 languages and published across Europe and the world. He lives in Washington, DC.
Rating: 5/5
Saturday, 2 November 2019
The Arena: Guidelines for Spiritual and Monastic Life by Ignatius (Brianchaninov)
Paperback: I can quite correctly call this work my mystical confession. - St Ignatius
It is fashionable in our times to value youth over experience, novelty above tradition. This classic work stands in unmistakable contrast to this tendency. First published in its original Russian edition in the year of the author's death, it is the summation of his more than forty years experience of Christian and monastic life.
Like the sayings of the Fathers of the Egyptian desert, offered by monks to their fellow strugglers, the wisdom offered in these pages is ageless and of wide application to every aspect of life. Tradition is revealed as an appropriation of Divine Life, passed on to others by both action and word.
The title given to the original English language edition The Arena has been kept as this aptly sums up its constant theme; the need for struggle if we are to progress in the spiritual life. Like the gladiatorial combat of the Roman arena this struggle is against wild beasts and well-armed foes. There are many watching; some shouting encouragement to the struggler and others cheering their foes. All of this is occurring within the arena of our own hearts as we do battle with the sin that prevents us from knowing God as He would be known.
As the now Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) writes in his foreword:
Such, then, is Bishop Ignatius' basic theme: he tells us of the struggle to be undertaken by every Christian in the spiritual arena. He speaks to us all, whether monks or not, explaining how we may tame, control, and transform the beast within - the lions and howling wolves of our inner jungle - and so build in our hearts Jerusalem, the city of peace and unity.
Subjects covered include unceasing prayer, the need for spiritual direction and the importance of Divine meditation. The original Russian edition was published in 1867. There is a helpful thirteen-page introduction provided by Archimandrite (now Metropolitan) Kallistos (aka Timothy Ware) as well as a glossary of terms.
The Arena (2012) is translated from the Russian by Archimandrite Lazarus (Moore).
About the author: St Ignatius (Branchininov) was one of the leading spiritual writers of 19th Century Russia. He became a monk in 1831 and the bishop of the Caucasus and the Black Sea in 1857. He devoted much of his life to writing spiritual works. He reposed in 1867.
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