An excellent, small book, with a wonderful story. Not everything we read has to run to 400+ pages...A great story in the hands of a skillful author can be told in a small book. Less is more.
This book is centered around a small church with a small congregation, mostly devout older women but not exclusively so. The priest, Father Diamond, is there doing his duties, unambitious, privately having a crisis of faith but pottering along in a small corner of Battersea.
All is as it should be until a simple-minded faithful parishioner Mary Margaret O'Reilly supposedly witnesses a miracle. Word gets out and the world goes mad, bus loads of tourists and pilgrims arrive and cause a huge crisis of faith for all involved.
The story centers around the miracle and it's consequences in the lives of Mary Margaret and her reclusive, morbidly obese mother and we also see the impact it has on the lives of Stella Morrison who is lonely in her marriage and misses her son who is away at boarding school and Alice Armitage eagerly awaits the return of her soldier son who is stationed in Afghanistan. The whole community is affected, we just don't know if it will be for good or ill.
The story is beautifully woven, well worth reading.
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