The Fire in the Heart of Siena
A complete, 22,000-word portrait of Saint Catherine of Siena: 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.
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Outside, Siena was burning with a different kind of fire. It was the last days of Carnival, 1367, and the streets that dropped away from the Fontebranda fountain were full of torches, wine, and the shrieking joy of people who knew that Lent was coming and meant to spend their gladness before the ashes fell. Drums thudded somewhere near the Campo. A boy's voice, cracking with laughter, called a girl's name three times under a window. Doors slammed. Bells rang for reasons that had nothing to do with prayer. None of it reached the small room at the top of the dyer's house on the Via dei Tintori, or if it reached it, it did not matter. Caterina di Jacopo di Benincasa knelt on the bare floor of the room that had been hers alone for three years, the room where she had gone, at fifteen, to shut the door on the world and open it, instead, on God. She was twenty years old now. Her father's vats of dye still steamed two floors below, the whole house forever faintly blue and red and gold at the hems of things, the family's bread bought with the color that stained her father's hands. She had grown up in that smell.
9 movements, carrying the whole life of Saint Catherine of Siena from beginning to enduring memory.
- The Ring No One Else Could See
- Born on the Feast of the Announcing Angel
- The Room That Became a Desert
- Come Out: The World Was Waiting
- A Pen Dipped in Fire
- The Wounds and the Wound in the Church
- The Last Journey to Rome
- Still Speaking: The Bridge, the Dialogue, the Doctor
- The Doorway
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.
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Then the whole life, and every other
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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.
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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?
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