Stuff
Product Details
Scribner, March 2001
Trade Paperback, 256 pages
ISBN-10: 0684868652
ISBN-13: 9780684868653
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
Description
Enter a Mysterious, Cloistered World Full of Passion and Regret, Where the Lines Between the Sexual, Artistic, and Religious Become Blurred.
This achingly beautiful and revelatory first novel is the story of three generations of strong-willed women and their battles to balance personal longings with the disciplines of their church: Meghan, who dismisses the priest's injunctions about sex until tragedy befalls her family; Kate, who so fears God's power to destroy that she shuts herself off from emotion completely; and, finally, Elise, whose connection to unknowable forces drives her into the most exhilarating, disillusioning, and haunting experience of her life.
Written with lyricism and emotional authenticity, Altar Music is a portrait of a nun as a young girl, an epic tale of a family both defined and divided by its religious beliefs, and a powerful story about mothers and daughters.
Read more:
Chapter 1Mary Gordon
author of Final Payments
Altar Music is a fine evocation of the various richnesses of a woman's inner life. I was particularly struck by the portrayal of convent life, which grips the reader while avoiding the twin traps of piety and melodrama.
Karen Armstrong
author of A History of God and Through the Narrow Gate
A brave and sensitive attempt to explore the connections between sexuality and religion, the perils of the celibate life, and the human capacity for self-regeneration. Weber convincingly shows how we can be held in thrall by the past, that human beings unwittingly pass a legacy of pain from one generation to another, but that healing and reconciliation are possible too.
Sheri Reynolds
author of The Rapture of Canaan
Altar Music is more than a love story, more than a family saga, more than a portrait of convent life or a spiritual journey. It is beautiful and sweeping, textured with the heat of wool and blood, the softness of a spider's web in wind, sounds of Christmas ornaments breaking, a single note ringing from a convent piano. Christin Lore Weber's novel reads like a song. It will sing you awake.
