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Plague Journal is Michael O'Brien's fourth novel in the Children of the Last Days series. The central character is Nathaniel Delaney, the editor of a small-town newspaper, who is about to face the greatest crisis of his life. As the novel begins, ominous events are taking place throughout North America, but little of it surfaces before the public eye. Set in the not-too-distant future, the story describes a nation that is quietly shifting from a democratic form of government to a form of totalitarianism. Delaney is one of the few voices left in the media who is willing to speak the whole truth about what is happening, and as a result the full force of the government is brought against him. T...
Set in present day Manhattan, The Fool of New York City is the tale of two souls who are considered to be "fools" and "idiots" in the eyes of most people they encounter. One is a literal giant, the other an amnesiac who believes he is the 17th century Spanish painter Francisco de Goya, hundreds of years old, aging more slowly than the rest of the human race. Billy the giant has also briefly suffered from amnesia years ago, and he understands the anguish of those who have lost their identity. He is an apparently simple person, a failed basketball player with an enormous good heart who takes Francisco under his wing after they meet through a seeming coincidence. Together they undertake a laborious search to discover Francisco's true past. The trail leads them to numerous adventures, into the shrouded realm of hidden memories, the ironies and complexities of human character and destiny, of catastrophic evil and of redemption. It is a journey into the mysterious dimensions of the mind. It is about trauma and remembrance in America.
Ethan McQuarry is a young lighthouse keeper on a tiny island, the rugged outcropping of easternmost Cape Breton Island on the Atlantic Ocean. A man without any family, he sees himself as a silent "vigilant", performing his duties courageously year after year, with an admirable sense of responsibility. He cherishes his solitude and is grateful that his interactions with human beings are rare. Even so, he is haunted by his aloneness in the world and by a feeling that his life is meaningless. His courage, his integrity, his love of the sea and wildlife, of practical skills and of learning are, in the end, not enough. He is faced with internal storms and sometimes literal storms of terrifying po...
Michael O'Brien presents a thrilling apocalyptic novel about the condition of the Roman Catholic Church at the end of time. It explores the state of the modern world, and the strengths and weaknesses of the contemporary religious scene, by taking his central character, Father Elijah Schäfer, a Carmelite priest, on a secret mission for the Vatican which embroils him in a series of crises and subterfuges affecting the ultimate destiny of the Church. Father Elijah is a convert from Judaism, a survivor of the Holocaust, a man once powerful in Israel. For twenty years he has been "buried in the dark night of Carmel" on the mountain of the prophet Elijah. The Pope and the Cardinal Secretary of St...
Dr. Owen Whitfield is the elderly Oxford professor of history who first appeared in Michael O''Brien''s novel The Father''s Tale. In the events of The Sabbatical, which occur sometime later, Dr. Whitfield is looking forward to a sabbatical year of peace and quiet, gardening in his backyard, and tinkering with what he calls his latest "unpublishable book". As the year begins, he is drawn by a series of seeming coincidences into involvement with a group of characters from across Europe, including a family that has been the target of assassination attempts by unknown powers. During his journey to Romania, the situation in which he finds himself becomes more sinister than it first seemed. The story deals with the tension between fatalism and the providential understanding of history, with the courage and love that are necessary for navigating through a confusion of signs, and with the triumph of faith and reason over the forces of destruction.
The Harry Potter series of books and movies are wildly popular. Many Christians see the books as largely if not entirely harmless. Others regard them as dangerous and misleading. In his book A Landscape with Dragons, Harry Potter critic Michael O'Brien examines contemporary children's literature and finds it spiritually and morally wanting. His analysis, written before the rise of the popular Potter books and films, anticipates many of the problems Harry Potter critics point to. A Landscape with Dragons is a controversial, yet thoughtful study of what millions of young people are reading and the possible impact such reading may have on them. In this study of the pagan invasion of children's ...
Michael O'Brien has been a professional painter of religious art since 1970. Though his reputation as a Catholic novelist and essayist began in 1996, and continues on the strength of more than twenty-eight published books, he is also widely known as a visual artist, with his paintings in churches, universities, and other institutions, as well as in public galleries and private collections throughout the world. In this book, O'Brien presents and comments on many of his important pieces. He explains his development as a religious artist and his philosophy of sacred art. The vibrancy, originality, and variety of his work are on display in more than one hundred twenty full-color reproductions of his paintings and Byzantine-style icons. Also included are some of his drawings and other works in black and white.
An insight of what it's like to be in prison on a day-to-day basis and how the prison system actually works. Michael O'Brien has first-hand experience of life inside Cardiff Prison. He tells the experiences of inmates and prison officer, alike.
This book tells the story of Michael O'Brien, one of the most popular Catholic novelists and painters of our times. It covers his life from his childhood in the Canadian Arctic to the crucial decision in 1976 to devote himself wholly to Christian sacred arts, followed by his inspiration to write fiction and his best-selling apocalyptic novel, Father Elijah. The story then continues to the present with explorations of O'Brien's other works. O'Brien's life is one of struggle against all odds to reestablish Christian culture in the materialist void created by the modern Western world. It is a timely reminder of hope in trials and sufferings, of endurance during marginalization and poverty. This...
America's Destruction of Iraq by Washington insider Michael M. O'Brien details the origins of radical Islamic terrorism now spreading across the Middle East and North Africa. The outgrowth of America's involvement in Iraq, culminating with its March 2003 invasion, is the Islamic State-the most violent terrorist organization in history. Michael O'Brien is an outlier: a conservative and former political appointee in the administration of George W. Bush, with an abiding contempt for the political and military mismanagement of the Iraq War, officially referred to as Operation Iraqi Freedom. A graduate of West Point and former Infantry officer, and a former U.S. government Contracting Officer, O'...