Mark Salzman's Lying Awake is a finely wrought gem that plumbs the depths of one woman's soul, and in so doing raises salient questions about the power-and price-of faith. Sister John's cloistered life of peace and prayer has been electrified by ever more frequent visions of God's radiance, leading her toward a deep religious ecstasy. Her life and writings have become examples of devotion. Yet her visions are accompanied by shattering headaches that compel Sister John to seek medical help. When her doctor tells her an illness may be responsible for her gift, Sister John faces a wrenching choice: to risk her intimate glimpses of the divine in favor of a cure, or to continue her visions with the knowledge that they might be false-and might even cost her her life.

"But Sister John's visions are accompanied by powerful headaches, and when a doctor reveals that they may be dangerous, she faces a devastating choice. For if her spiritual gifts are symptoms of illness rather than grace, will a "cure" mean the end of her visions and a soul once again dry and searching?"--BOOK JACKET.

An eight-year old girl lies awake waiting for sleep on Grandfather's boat, enjoying the sounds of the marina coming through the open porthole, and reflecting on the day full of adventure and discovery out on the tide flats with her grandfather.

The work of Belgian artist and photographer Geert Goiris straddles a liminal position between landscape and still life. Haunting and dreamlike, the sometimes alien images denote a fundamental tension between man and nature often bordering on the sublime. From seemingly composed scenes of various objects or portraits to architectural and natural landscapes, the images impart a sense of uncanny timing or discerning observation, achieving both qualities of suspended time and unspoken narrative. Included is 'Myths, Places and Protagonists', a collection of short texts by Goiris offering personal insight into how a number of the images came to be created or inspired. 0Exhibition: M-Museum, Leuven, Belgium (14.2.-19.5.2013)

As a fine novelist, critic and biographer Catherine Carswell led a passionate and various life, full of intellectual commitment and a wide range of social interests. She worked on this original, modest and yet richly remarkable autobiography over a number of years, coming back to it again and again, almost as an act of meditation. The younger daughter of a Glasgow shipping merchant, Catherine Macfarlane studied music in Frankfurt before returning to Glasgow and then moving to London where she worked as a literary and dramatic reviewer and met her second husband, Donald Carswell, and a wide circle of literary and cultural figures, including a succession of Soviet ambassadors, Lady Tweedsmuir and D.H. Laurence. In fact she became one of Laurence’s close friends, and it was he who encouraged her to write her first novel, Open the Door!, based on her own background and a sense of growing social and spiritual independence. Carswell’s interests and enthusiasms encompassed (among others) Herzen, Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Rabelais, Burns and Boccaccio, but Lying Awake is the distillation of her thoughts on her own life and indeed on the nature of identity and autobiography itself. Left unfinished when she died in 1946, the manuscript was edited by her son John and has not been reprinted since it was first published in 1950.

Sindiwe Magona’s superb collection of short stories brings a full range of South African women’s experience brilliantly to light From the village mother leaving her children to work; the maid in service to the white medem; the black child raped and murdered, Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night is at once tragic, triumphant, humorous, and sharp, but above all forcefully empowering.

In this novel Mark Salzman opens up the mysterious world of the cloister, drawing a brilliant portrait of the rigours of religious life, and especially of one woman's trial at the perilous intersection of faith and reason.