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How much of his story should he tell? Most importantly of all – can he even trust himself to tell it? 1579. Nico Cusmano, an old man in ill health, sits in a reception room in his brother Edo’s Milanese villa. He will tell the story of his life, and that of Edo. Of their rise from the humblest of peasant childhoods in the Aeolian Islands to their triumph as the most famous puppeteers and showmen of the Palermo court of the Viceroy. But his story is also one of brutal family tragedy and madness. Of blood feuds, jealousies and betrayals, and the looming presence of the Inquisition. At its heart is the figure of Hadice, a woman loved by both brothers, sitting just feet away from him as he speaks.
What happens when you have to deal with something devastating you cannot change? In Graham Bullen's The Broch, we follow the moving journey of a man running away from answers and towards the realities of his own mortality in the wilds of the Scottish Outer Hebrides. Martin, locked inside the prison of his recently acquired alcoholism, is on a quest to fulfil the promise of a holiday booked weeks before his wife’s sudden death. He stays in the reconstruction of an Iron Age dwelling overlooking the white-sanded fringes of the North Atlantic. Twenty miles to his north lies The Clisham, a coastal peak from which he plans to end his life. We wrestle with the destruction of Martin’s life plan;...
Choosing Joy, a deftly-woven mosaic of memories, tells John Dempster’s story, with particular focus on his life-long quest to find a way of being which is at once joyful, life-affirming and true to his own experience. There are honest descriptions of spiritual trauma and the anxiety and depression which complicate the author’s quest for an inner homecoming. He describes with forgiveness and at times wry humour the effects of the Christian formation he received in childhood; he charts his engagement with evangelicalism, Reformed Theology, the charismatic movement, post-modernism, and most recently faith ‘deconstruction’ and ‘reconstruction’. And he recalls moments of joy, grace an...
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