All Manner of Thing
A complete, 22,000-word portrait of Julian of Norwich: a whole book, told with full reverence from within the tradition. Not a sample chapter. Enter your email and it is waiting in your own library here: read it, and your place is always kept.
No password to invent, we send a link to your email, and your library opens.
A complete book, free · no password, ever · reverent, from within the tradition.
Or open every life in the house at once: become a member — $3.69 a month or $24.69 a year, first week free →
The candle had been burning since before dawn, a thick stub of tallow set on the sill because there was no other ledge to hold it, and its smoke had begun to lay a thin grey veil along the low beam above the bed. Outside, Norwich was waking the way it always woke — carts on the cobbles down toward the river, gulls quarreling over the fish stalls, the bells of a dozen parish churches finding their separate voices and then, for a moment, agreeing. Inside the room, none of that mattered. A woman lay dying, and everyone gathered close to her had already said their goodbyes. She was thirty years old and a half — her own words, set down years later with the plain precision of someone who had once counted the hours of her own life as they slipped away and had never forgotten the number. For seven nights and days her body had been failing by degrees, the way a house loses its light room by room at dusk. The feeling had gone first from her legs, then crept upward past her waist, a slow tide of numbness that no poultice or prayer had turned back. Her breath had shortened to almost nothing.
9 movements, carrying the whole life of Julian of Norwich from beginning to enduring memory.
- The Morning the Wall Fell Away
- A City That Had Already Buried Its Dead
- Three Prayers That Should Have Frightened Her
- Sixteen Shewings in a Single Morning
- Buried in Order to Live
- Twenty Years of Not Quite Understanding
- Jesus Our Mother, and the Sin That Was Behovely
- The Window Never Closed
- The Doorway at the Anchorhold Wall
Bought here, this life does not land in a downloads folder. It lives in your own library, in rooms built for unhurried reading and listening.
The Reading Room
Pages that truly turn. Type sized to your eyes, line by line; Night, Paper, or Sepia; your place kept to the paragraph, on every device you own.
The Listening Room
This life is being voiced now. Own it in ebook today and the narration joins your library the day it is finished, at no extra cost. The early believer is never left behind.
Your Library
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Then the whole life, and every other
One membership opens all 3 volumes of this life, and every other life in the Sanctuary besides, to read here and to listen to here, with each new life joining the day it is finished.
The free book asks nothing and expires never.
Questions, answered
What is the free book, and is there a catch?
No catch. The Invitation is a real book, free, and yours to keep: a complete portrait of this life in about 20,000 words, not a sample or a teaser. It is the doorway. The three volumes tell the life in its fullness, and they are here whenever you wish to go deeper.
How do I read it? Do I need an account?
Enter your email and we send a single sign-in link, and no password to invent. Your library opens in your browser, holding the book, and your reading place is always kept across your devices.
Is there an audiobook?
The three volumes are available as ebooks today; the audiobook narration joins your library when each life is voiced, at no extra cost to owners.
What does it cost?
The free Invitation costs nothing, and always will. Everything else is one membership: $3.69 a month or $24.69 a year, with the first week free. It opens every life in the house, every volume and every audiobook, and each new life joins the day it is finished.
Can I cancel?
Any time, in one click, from your library. You keep everything to the end of the period you have paid for, and we never ask why.
What if I would rather own a copy?
Every life is sold in print and ebook through the ordinary bookshops: Ingram, Google Play, Apple Books, Kobo. The membership is how to read the whole house; the shops are how to keep one life on your shelf forever.