"A memoir of the author's experience growing up in an apocalyptic cult, with an emphasis on how understanding the natural world was her key to escape and survival"--

When his friend Father Andréi is killed on a train en route to the Vatican, Father Nil, a Benedictine who teaches the Gospel of St. John to novices, decides to conduct his own investigation. The dead priest possessed proof of the existence of a 13th disciple and an epistle stating that Jesus was nothing more than an inspired prophet, not the son of God -- two things that would spell great danger for the Catholic church. Father Nil then discovers a previously unpublished account of the origins of Christianity. It tells of the Nazarenes, a community excluded from the official Church by Peter and Paul, which appears to have thrived until the seventh century and given birth to Islam. While the priest pushes ahead with his investigation, the Pope's advisors, rival factions, and secret societies are trying, by any means, to lay their hands on his findings. From the Mossad to Fatah, everyone seems to have a very good reason to keep the 13th disciple a secret.

Imagine an eighteen-year-old American girl who has never read a newspaper, watched television, or made a phone call. An eighteen-year-old-girl who has never danced-and this in the 1960s. It is in Cambridge, Massachusetts where Leonard Feeney, a controversial (soon to be excommunicated) Catholic priest, has founded a religious community called the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The Center's members-many of them educated at Harvard and Radcliffe-surrender all earthly possessions and aspects of their life, including their children, to him. Patricia Chadwick was one of those children, and Little Sister is her account of growing up in the Feeney sect. Separated from her parents and forbidden to speak to them, Patricia bristles against the community's draconian rules, yearning for another life. When, at seventeen, she is banished from the Center, her home, she faces the world alone, without skills, family, or money but empowered with faith and a fierce determination to succeed on her own, which she does, rising eventually to the upper echelons of the world of finance and investing. A tale of resilience and grace, Little Sister chronicles, in riveting prose, a surreal childhood and does so without rancor or self-pity.

"Rebecca Stott both adored and feared her father, Roger Stott, a high-ranking minister in the Brighton, England, branch of the Exclusive Brethren, a separatist fundamentalist Christian sect. A man of contradictions, he preached that the Brethren should shun the outside world, which was ruled by Satan, yet he kept a radio in the trunk of his car and read Shakespeare and Yeats. Years later, when the Stotts broke with the Brethren after a scandal involving the cult's leader, Roger became an actor and compulsive gambler who left the family penniless and ended up in jail....In the Days of Rain is Rebecca Stott's attempt to make sense of her childhood in the Exclusive Brethren, to understand her father's role in the cult and in the breaking apart of her family, and to come to be at peace with her relationship with a larger-than-life figure whose faults were matched by a passion for life, a thirst for knowledge, and a love of literature and beauty. A father-daughter story as well as a memoir of growing up in a closed-off community and then finding a way out of it, this is an inspiring and beautiful account of the bonds of family and the power of self-invention."--Jacket .