Nine Hundred Pounds for Vespers

About this book

At the end of January 2024 the last monks of Ravensgill Abbey, in Cumbria's Eden Valley, sing their final Office and leave. Brother Aidan, born Michael Brennan, does not go with them. After forty years of prayer he has asked for one year outside, still under vows, to find out whether his life was a choice or only a habit. He gets as far as the gatehouse. The abbey's new owner, Tamsin Quarrie, the burnt-out co-founder of a phone-addiction fitness app, is turning his cloister into a digital-detox retreat at nine hundred pounds a weekend, and she wants him on the payroll. In the kitchen, eighteen-year-old Jodie Lowther, whose family farmed these fields for half a century, is scrubbing pots and putting off her own escape. Three strangers on familiar ground, one bell, and a year to find out what a life is worth when nobody is telling you how to live it.