It's the summer of 1960 in Atkinson, Vermont. Maria Fermoyle is a strong but vulnerable divorced woman whose loneliness and ambition for her children make her easy prey for dangerous con man Omar Duvall. Marie's children are Alice, seventeen—involved with a young priest; Norm, sixteen—hotheaded and idealistic; and Benny, twelve—isolated and misunderstood, and so desperate for his mother's happiness that he hides the deadly truth he knows about Duvall. We also meet Sam Fermoyle, the children's alcoholic father; Sam's brother-in-law, who makes anonymous "love" calls from the bathroom of his failing appliance store; and the Klubock family, who—in contrast to the Fermoyles—live an orderly life in the house next door. Songs in Ordinary Time is a masterful epic of the everyday, illuminating the kaleidoscope of lives that tell the compelling story of this unforgettably family.

Set on the high plains of Texas, in a town called Durance, Ordinary Time is anovel that speaks to the ultimate questions of faith and hard testing. Authortour.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE TIMES, GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES, DAILY EXPRESS, SCOTSMAN and SPECTATOR Three journeys. One road. England, 1348. A gentlewoman flees an odious arranged marriage, a Scots proctor sets out for Avignon and a young ploughman in search of freedom is on his way to volunteer with a company of archers. All come together on the road to Calais. Coming in their direction from across the Channel is the Black Death, the plague that will wipe out half of the population of Northern Europe. As the journey unfolds, overshadowed by the archers' past misdeeds and clerical warnings of the imminent end of the world, the wayfarers must confront the nature of their loves and desires. A tremendous feat of language and empathy, it summons a medieval world that is at once uncannily plausible, utterly alien and eerily reflective of our own. James Meek's extraordinary To Calais, In Ordinary Time is a novel about love, class, faith, loss, gender and desire - set against one of the biggest cataclysms of human history.

Examines the distinct leadership roles of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during the war years and discusses the dynamics of their marriage.

In Ordinary Time, Nancy Mairs brings her trademark directness to the subject of religion. Themes that bring out piety and sentimentality in many writers, Mairs treats with all her usual outspokenness, candor, and courage. Mairs is a passionate questioner and storyteller, and above all Ordinary Time is writing firmly rooted in the messy realities and questions - the "ordinary time" - of one woman's life. Mairs's marriage is in many ways at the center of the book ("My spirit has been schooled in wedlock"), and she draws a portrait of her life with her husband that is detailed in a way rarely seen in personal writing. She shows us moments of marital despair (in "Here: Grace", for instance), but also the details of the way toward clarity and reconciliation. Mairs writes with wit, exactitude, and intelligence about her conversion from a devout New England Protestant teenager, "a bit mystically inclined", to an unorthodox, activist Catholic in the Southwest; about her commitment to feminism two years later (and about her uneasy dual identity as Catholic and feminist); about run-ins with "monomaniacal" priests; about her husband's cancer and her own disease; about women and the Church; about charity and the body; about raising children; about understanding "God's will" and imagining death.

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize: “Thought-provoking, poignant, brutal, amusing, and always beautiful.”—Elizabeth Berg Hurrying through errands, attending a dying mother, helping her own child down the playground slide, the speaker in these poems wonders: what is the difference between the self and the soul? The secular and the sacred? Where is the kingdom of heaven? And how does one live in Ordinary Time—during those apparently unmiraculous periods of everyday trouble and joy?

Take a wide-eyed look at your life--the commonplace, joyful, and even heartbreaking events--and discover the presence of God, hidden in plain sight. This is the invitation of Christine Eberle's Finding God in Ordinary Time. Each daily reflection contains a true story and a nugget of spiritual insight, accompanied by thought-provoking questions and a memorable Scripture quote. Together they guide readers across four terrains where the divine presence may be hidden in plain sight. Warm, accessible, and surprisingly funny, Christine offers spiritual nourishment to people skeptical or weary of religion, while still giving the faithful something to chew on.