And Then There Were Nuns: Adventures in a cloistered life

Biographies & Memoirs

Christmas, Jane

Memoirs

Lion Books

To honour a promise to her dying father, Jane takes her ageing incontinent mother to Italy. What could possibly go wrong? Jane Christmas had always had a difficult relationship with her mother, but thought that a mother and daughter trip to Italy could be the start of a whole new friendship. In this hilarious but poignant memoir, she discovers that it will not be that easy. Describing her mother as a cross between 'Queen Victoria and Hyacinth Bucket', Jane struggles to build bridges to a woman she has always found a puzzle, while also trying to cope with her mother's failing health and physical needs.

Incontinent on the Continent

Glendearg Cottage: A Tale Concerning Church Principles (1846)

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Religion & Spirituality

Kessinger Publishing

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Kessinger Publishing, LLC

Glendearg Cottage: A Tale Concerning Church Principles

Contemporary

Nabu Press

Moving house has never flustered author Jane Christmas. She loves houses: viewing them, negotiating their price, dreaming up interior plans, hiring tradespeople to do the work and overseeing renovations. She loves houses so much that she’s moved thirty-two times.
There are good reasons for her latest house move, but after viewing sixty homes, Jane and her husband succumb to the emotional fatigue of an overheated English housing market and buy a wreck in the town of Bristol that is overpriced, will require more money to renovate than they have and that neither of them particularly like.
As Jane’s nightmare renovation begins, her mind returns to the Canadian homes where she grew up with parents who moved and renovated constantly around the Toronto area. Suddenly, the protective seal is blown off Jane’s memory of a strict and peripatetic childhood and its ancillary damage—lost friends, divorces, suicide attempts—and the past threatens to shake the foundations of her marriage. This latest renovation dredges a deeper current of memory, causing Jane to question whether in renovating a house she is in fact attempting to renovate her past.
With humour and irreverence, Open House reveals that what we think we gain by constantly moving house actually obscures the precious and vital parts of our lives that we leave behind. 
This is a memoir that will appeal to anyone whose pulse quickens at the mere mention of real estate.

Open House: A Life in Thirty-Two Moves

Arts & Photography

Architecture

Patrick Crean Editions

The Pelee Project : One Woman's Escape from Urban Madness

ECW Press

To celebrate her 50th birthday and face the challenges of mid-life, Jane Christmas joins 14 women to hike the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. Despite a psychic’s warning of catfights, death, and a sexy, fair-haired man, Christmas soldiers on. After a week of squabbles, the group splinters and the real adventure begins. In vivid, witty style, she recounts her battles with loneliness, hallucinations of being joined by Steve Martin, as well as picturesque villages and even the fair-haired man. What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim is one trip neither the author nor the reader will forget.

What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim: A Midlife Misadventure on Spain's Camino de Santiago

Sports & Outdoors

Individual Sports

Greystone Books

To smooth over five decades of constant clashing, determined daughter Jane Christmas decides to take her arthritic, incontinent, and domineering mother, Valeria, to Italy. Will being at the epicenter of the Renaissance spark a renaissance in their relationship? As they drag each other from the Amalfi Coast to Tuscany — walkers, shawls, and a mobile pharmacy of medications in tow — they find new ways to bitch and bicker, in the process reassessing who they are and how they might reconcile. Unflinching and often hilarious, this book speaks to all women who have faced that special challenge of making friends with Mom.

Incontinent on the Continent: My Mother, Her Walker, and Our Grand Tour of Italy

Travel

Europe

With humor and opinions aplenty, a woman embarks on an unconventional quest to see if she is meant to be a nun. Just as Jane Christmas decides to enter a convent in mid-life to find out whether she is nun material”, her long-term partner Colin, suddenly springs a marriage proposal on her. Determined not to let her monastic dreams be sidelined, Christmas puts her engagement on hold and embarks on an extraordinary year long adventure to four conventsone in Canada and three in the UK. In these communities of cloistered nuns and monks, she sharesand at times chafes and rails againstthe silent, simple existence she has sought all of her life. Christmas takes this spiritual quest seriously, but her story is full of the candid insights, humorous social faux pas, profane outbursts, and epiphanies that make her books so relatable and popular. And Then There Were Nuns offers a seldom-seen look inside modern cloistered life, and it is sure to ruffle more than a few starched collars among the ecclesiastical set.

And Then There Were Nuns: Adventures in a Cloistered Life

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