Stations of the Cross

The book is a sequence of stories, designed for Christians, based on Gollon's Stations of the Cross: 14 paintings commissioned for St John's on Bethnal Green, a church (designed by Sir John Soane) in the heart of London's East End. The opening chapter describes the history of the Stations of the Cross (and other artists who have created them), and the risky but brave collaboration between Gollon and St John's.; The 14 stories (to accompany the 14 traditional stations) are first-person narratives, similar in approach to the Women of the Passion sequence the author wrote for BBC Radio 4 for Holy Week 1990 and published in Angel and Me (Continuum). Like the Stations, the stories are contemporary in style and emotion but not a-historical. They are unashamedly (given the context) 'medieval' in the sense that they use the legendary stories about the characters as well as the specifically Biblical ones (eg the 13th century legend that Veronica was the woman with the "issue of blood" whom Jesus cured and who now returns the service by wiping his face).

Sara Maitland was born in 1950. Her first novel Daughter of Jerusalem won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1979. Since then she has written five more novels and has published five collections of short stories.

'If we follow these pictures and stories, they will deepen our prayers and enrich our spiritual life.'--Sanford Lakoff