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.

Homicide detective Raimy Vaught is a losing contestant in the biggest reality show ever: the colonization of Mars. Brother Michael is a Benedictine monk who just wants to help the future happen. Andrei Bykhovski is an asteroid miner desperately escaping indentured servitude. Bridget Tobin is a hydroponic farmer studying the greenhouses of Luna. But when a fellow Mars contestant drops dead at a Lunar monastery, these four souls will find themselves...

When a mysterious child appears at the monastery of the Order of the Chronicles of Sorrowing, Brother Edik nurses her back to health, but when he uncovers her dangerous secret, she is sent away into the world with a goat and a boy.

"An unforgettable debut novel from an award-winning writer: a lively, daring ghost story about a dead teen girl who falls in love with a female writer who has no idea she exists. In 1473, fourteen-year-old Blanca dies in childbirth in a hilltop monastery in Mallorca. Nearly four hundred years later, when George Sand, her two children, and her lover Frederic Chopin arrive in the village, Blanca is still there: a spirited, funny, righteous ghost, she's...

Examines the lives of the young warrior monks who live in the Shaolin Temple and practice martial arts, engage in prayer, and are vegetarians.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Kathy Reichs returns with her twenty-first taut novel of suspense featuring forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan who, after receiving a box with a human eyeball in it, uncovers a series of ever more grisly killings eerily reenacting the most shocking of her prior cases. Winter has come to North Carolina and, with it, a drop in crime. For a while, temporarily idle forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan is content...

A true, never-before-told story—discovered in a secret Vatican archive—of sex, poison, and lesbian initiation rites in a nineteenth-century convent.

In 1858, a German princess, recently inducted into the convent of Sant’Ambrogio in Rome, wrote a frantic letter to her cousin, a confidant of the Pope, claiming that she was being abused and feared for her life. What the subsequent investigation by the Church’s

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Eight French Christian monks live in harmony with their Muslim brothers in a monastery in the mountains of North Africa in the 1990s. When a crew of foreign workers are massacred by an Islamic fundamentalist group, fear sweeps though the region. The army offers them protection, but the monks refuse. Despite the growing menace in their midst, they slowly realize that they have no choice but to stay, come what may.