Clare's Choice: Some Choices Take Eight Centuries to Understand (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798251731910)

London, now. Assisi, 1212. Eight centuries apart. The same impossible question. Mara is thirty-seven, successful, and living a life that looks perfect from the outside. A good job. A good man. A good flat in West London. Everything she was supposed to want - and a specific, nameless emptiness she has told no one about. Then, at a party she didn't want to attend, she finds a small brown book on a library shelf. The Life of Clare of Assisi. She sits down on the floor and reads for an hour. She misses dinner entirely. Clare of Assisi was eighteen years old when she made the choice that defined her life. On the night of Palm Sunday, 1212, she slipped out of her family's palazzo after dark, walked two miles through the forest, and handed everything to Francis of Assisi. Her family came for her. They pleaded. They tried to drag her back by force. She held onto the altar and refused to move. She was eighteen years old and she had made up her mind, and nothing - not her father's fury, not her mother's tears, not the disapproval of an entire city - was going to unmake it. She went on to found an order that still exists today, in sixty-two countries, and to write the first Rule for a religious community ever written by a woman. She got it approved the day before she died. Clare's Choice tells both stories - Clare's and Mara's - across eight centuries, asking the question that both their lives make unavoidable: What do you do when the life everyone wants for you is not the life that will keep you alive? Not the inspiring version of that question. The difficult version. What do you lose? What do you break? What do the people who love you feel, when your truest self turns out to be somewhere they cannot follow? And how do you know - at eighteen, or thirty-seven, or fifty - which voice inside you is the one worth listening to? For readers of Lessons in Chemistry, The Midnight Library, and A Gentleman in Moscow. The Francis of Assisi Series - Book Three.

Author: J. D. Vale
ISBN-13: 9798251731910
Publisher: Independently Published
Language: English
Published: 03/11/2026
Pages: 106
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.34lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.22d