Jane Christmas’s non-fiction – whether about travelling with her aged mother or making a pilgrimage on Spain’s Camino de Santiago de Compostela – always combines humour and strong powers of observation. She applies both in And Then There Were Nuns ($19.95, Greystone), a chronicle of her adventures in four convents, experiences she sought in order to make a choice between the cloistered life and a recent proposal of marriage. At once irreverent and spiritually aware, Christmas juggles her lust for life with her yearning for a simpler existence in a book with a unique perspective.
