STARBRIDGE SERIES by Susan Howatch

Glittering Images

(Starbridge #1)

Glittering Images is narrated by The Revd Canon Dr Charles Ashworth, a Cambridge academic who undergoes something of a spiritual and nervous breakdown after being sent by the Archbishop of Canterbury surreptitiously to investigate a menage a trois in the household of the Bishop of Starbridge. Ashworth is helped to recovery, and to realise the source of his problems by Fr Jonathan Darrow, the Abbot of the Granchester Abbey of the Fordite Monks.

An outstanding storyteller, Susan Howatch has created a novel of spirituality and morality where the loyalties and passions of four people are played out against their dedication to religion and the path of right.

Passionately eloquent…. tale of God, sex, love, self-analysis and forgiveness.

Glamorous Powers

(Starbridge #2)

Fascinating...convincing...believable.

NEWSDAY

The time is 1940. Jonathan Darrow is an Anglican priest when he receives a shattering vision and knows he must leave the monastery that has been his home for seventeen years. As he plunges into the temptations of the real world, a crisis sends him into the labyrinth of his past to pluck out the buried truth beneath the deceptions he has been living through.

Ultimate Prizes

(Starbridge #3)

The third in Susan Howatch's Church of England novels, ULTIMATE PRIZES begins in 1942 with the world at war, as narrator and archdeacon Nevill Aysgarth finds himself falling into a hopeless obsession over Dido Tallent, beautiful celebrity, and finds himself pursuing her through a swamp of guilt and the destruction of his valued moral compass....

Scandalous Risks

(Starbridge #4)

As Venetia Flaxton edges closer to the threshold of a love affair with the Dean of the Cathedral--a man old enough to be her father--his hidden emotional past and her moral conflict lead them deeper into the mysteries of the human heart and soul. A powerfully moving novel set in the turbulence of the 1960s.

Mystical Paths

(Starbridge #5)

When Nicholas Darrow follows his father into the Anglican priesthood in 1968 at the age of twenty-five, he is fleeing a troubled past. But when his fascination with his own psychic powers results in a near-tragedy, Nicholas must face the truth about his relationship with his father before he can find his way out of the seemingly impenetrable darkness that engulfs him.

Absolute Truths

(Starbridge #6)

It is 1965, and Charles Ashworth has attained the plum position of bishop of Starbridge, an honor that keeps him in a heady whirl of activity that would exhaust the most seasoned corporate executive. With the invaluable support of his minions and his attractive, unsinkable wife, Ashworth stands against the amorality and decadence of the age—"Anti-Sex Ashworth." He slays his opponents by being a tough, efficient, confident churchman, the torments of his past long since dead and buried.

And then the unexpected, the unthinkable, strikes.

Suddenly Ashworth finds himself staring into the chasm of all the lies hes been telling himself for years: about his marriage, his children, even his views on the Church. And as he suspects his old nemesis and dean, Neville Aysgarth, of drinking too much, of financial chicanery, of—God forbid—having an affair, Ashworth discovers to his horror that he is tempted to commit the very acts that he has so publicly denounced....