When John Blessing dies and leaves behind two small children, the loss reverberates across his extended family for years to come.

The Thorn Birds is a robust, romantic saga of a singular family, the Clearys. It begins in the early part of this century, when Paddy Cleary moves his wife, Fiona, and their seven children to Drogheda, the vast Australian sheep station owned by his autocratic and childless older sister; and it ends more than half a century later, when the only survivor of the third generation, the brilliant actress Justine O'Neill, sets a course of life and love halfway...

Katherine Valentine's two previous Dorsetville novels enchanted readers with lovable characters and rich humor. The third installment delivers more of the day-to-day intrigue and comic happenstance only found in Valentine's endearing community. All is not well in Dorsetville-the sheriff is ill, tragic news awaits Lori Peterson-but in a close-knit community like this, there is no shortage of neighborly care to get you through life's twists and turns....

"Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Dorothy Day the founder of the Catholic Worker in New York; Flannery O'Connor a "Christ-haunted" literary prodigy in Georgia; and Walker Percy a doctor in Louisiana who had quit medicine in order to write. Although they never met as a group, for three decades they read one another's work, corresponded, and grappled with what Percy called a "predicament shared in common": their desire to reconcile the...

Spans three decades from the early twenties to World War II in Charles Ryder's relationship with the wild and eccentric Sebastian Flyte and the aristocratic Marchmain family.

A magisterial history of the centuries-long conflict between 'progress' and 'tradition' in the world's largest international institution. The story of Roman Catholicism has never followed a singular path. In no time period has this been more true than over the last two centuries. Beginning with the French Revolution, extending to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, and concluding with present-day crises, John T. McGreevy chronicles the dramatic...

The basis for the film starring Kieran Culkin. "Evoked with the rare, genuine sort of candor that made Holden Caulfield—and J.D. Salinger—famous."—Vogue Set in Savannah, Georgia, in the early 1970s, this is a novel of the anarchic joy of youth and encounters with the concerns of early adulthood. Francis Doyle, Tim Sullivan, and their three closest friends are altar boys at Blessed Heart Catholic Church and eighth-grade classmates at the parish...