Ocean State Libraries

The first novel in the Matthew Shardlake Tudor Mystery series—the inspiration for the Hulu original series Shardlake!
Dissolution is an utterly riveting portrayal of Tudor England. The year is 1537, and the country is divided between those faithful to the Catholic Church and those loyal to the king and the newly established Church of England. When a royal commissioner is brutally murdered in a monastery on the south coast...

"A revelatory account of how Christian monks identified distraction as a fundamental challenge, and how their efforts to defeat it can inform ours, more than a millennium later"--

The "Godforgotten" are the nuns and monks on the fictitious island of Saint Cyprian that believed that the Second Coming of Christ brought about the apocalypse in A.D. 997 when their island was besieged by an earthquake and tidal wave. They were under the impression that they were the only survivors to remain and that God had forsaken them. For a century, their believes and society continued under this impression until Father Albrecht, of the Benedictine...

Viridiana, who is about to become a nun, does her utmost to maintain her Catholic principles, but her lecherous uncle and a motley assemblage of paupers force her to confront the limits of her idealism.