The Giant in the Doorway
He found in orthodoxy the wildest romance, and laughed the world back to wonder. A complete 20,000-word book, free and yours to keep. Not a sample chapter.
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Told with full reverence from within the tradition. Enter your email and it is waiting in your own library here: read it, and your place is always kept across every device.
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The lamp is turned up behind the little stage, and for a moment the whole nursery holds its breath. Gilbert is small enough still to kneel rather than sit, chin on the edge of the table, eyes an inch from the painted proscenium his father has built out of cardboard and tin foil and patient winter evenings. Behind the scenery — behind the castle wall, behind the forest of pasted green, behind the cut-out figures on their thin wooden slides — there is a candle, or perhaps by now a little oil lamp, and when his father's hand turns the wick up, colour comes pouring through the paper world like blood into a face. The dragon is orange. The moat is a blue so fierce it seems to hum. A man in a doorway lifts a key that has been painted, quite extravagantly, gold. Gilbert will grow up to be one of the most quoted Englishmen who ever lived, a man whose sentences would be carried in the pockets of popes and poets and half-converted undergraduates for a hundred years and counting.
9 movements, carrying the whole life of Gilbert Keith Chesterton from beginning to enduring memory.
- The Light Behind the Little Stage
- A Boy Who Refused to Be Bored
- The Lady, the Ink, and the City of Fog
- The Case for Joy
- A Priest in the Rain, a Rival at the Table
- The Darkness That Did Not Win
- Building on the Rock
- Dying with a Joke, Living On
- Come Further In
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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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?
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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?
The free Invitation costs nothing, and always will. Everything else is one membership: $2.06 a month, billed once a year as $24.69. It opens every life in the house, every volume and every audiobook, and each new life joins the day it is finished. A year of everything here costs less than two audiobooks anywhere else.
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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.