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Francis

A Life in Songs

Ann Wroe

$49.99

Hardback

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English
Jonathan Cape Ltd
15 November 2018
A life of St Francis in verse
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*LONGLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2019
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*SHORTLISTED FOR THE CATHOLIC HERALD BOOK AWARDS 2019
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A life of St Francis in verse

Throughout her career Ann Wroe has constantly confounded expectations, following her own unique path. Now, in Francis, she turns to verse to tell the life of St Francis of Assisi. This is a sequence only Ann Wroe could write, combining a troubadour's musicality with full grasp of the moment, and a luminous sense of Francis as both myth and man, across history and culture, in nature and community. It is a remarkable and immensely beautiful book.

St Francis was one of the most compelling spirits the world has seen. He was also a poet, a musician and a dancer. His world was coloured by troubadour lays, brightened by birdsong, ordered by the bells and chants of the Church and transfigured by the angel-lyres he heard about him. For Ann Wroe, this seems a good reason to write his life in songs. It is also an excuse to record, in songs, the many ways his presence and his music still linger round us. They surprise us in chance encounters in city streets; they waylay us amid the humdrum banalities of working life; they persist in the beauties of nature. Great spirits never leave us. They echo on and on.
By:  
Imprint:   Jonathan Cape Ltd
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 205mm,  Width: 137mm,  Spine: 18mm
Weight:   391g
ISBN:   9781787331488
ISBN 10:   1787331482
Pages:   208
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Ann Wroe is the Briefings and Obituaries editor of The Economist. She is the author of six previous works of non-fiction, including Pilate- The Biography of an Invented Man, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Award and the W.H. Smith Award. She lives in north London.

Reviews for Francis: A Life in Songs

This passionate series of engagements with the life of St Francis will stay in my mind for a very long time - I hope forever... This is a poet with a distinctive voice, a command of form and a lightness of touch matched by a depth of heart... Wroe so triumphantly [exercises the imagination] in poem after poem. -- A. N. Wilson * Spectator * This extraordinary book... is quite haunting... [Francis] is one of the saints who is appealing even in a secular age... this isn't a book just for the faithful; it's for lovers of poetry in life and literature... a wonderful little book. -- Melanie McDonagh * Evening Standard *


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