I loved the story telling, from when Julian was a young girl watching her father die from the plague through to her voluntarily being walled up in her cell and how she dealt with that.

Everything has dissolved, even the little word, and there is only God beholding in me and I am no one and no where. It is as if we have finally found the lost autobiography of one of the medieval world's most important women .From the author of Miles to Go before I Sleep comes I, Julian, the account of a medieval woman who dares to tell her own story, battling grief, plague, the church and societal expectations to do so. But in the midst of suspicion and menace, when the Church is actively condemning heretics, Julian is not safe.

It is mostly fiction as so little is actually known about Julian but it has been written with great sensitivity and is very believable. Yet first through her visions, then through her later years of contemplation she gains a deep and abiding sense of God's love. Seeds germinate, sap rises, birdsong erupts, spirit lifts and expands and loves all that is made: it is so very good. Julian joins a lay company of devout women, happy, frankly, no longer to have to bear the burden of a “household”.Sin is behovely (inevitable in context, perhaps beneficial to someone) and carries no fault (it is simply bad, like a trip or a fall). We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Tender, luminous, meditative and powerful, this is a powerful fictional retelling of the life of Julian of Norwich – the mother, mystic and radical.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publishers, John Murray for providing me with an advance reading copy. Written with profound insight, spiritual and psychological, and a rare sensitivity to the everyday world of the fourteenth century, it is a brilliantly illuminating companion to one of the greatest works of spiritual writing in English. It is a beautiful, intensely moving achievement which not only excites literary admiration: it renews the reader's faith that 'all shall be well'. The 14th revelation of the parable of the Lord and Servant is the most intriguing and I think its reinterpretation of the Fall is completely brilliant.It carries a universal message, a system of belief and of living, that is based on the premise of a loving God, and that is in essence optimistic. I can’t enumerate all 16 here, but Revelation 14, on the subject of sin and prayer, is of particular importance. It is as if we have finally found the lost autobiography of one of the medieval world’s most important women. Around 20 years later, Julian, by now a solitary contemplative living in physical isolation (an “anchorite”), wrote the ‘long version’ of the Revelations herself.