When five-year-old Gregory ‘Hirst’ Bocking witnesses the spectacular installation of the new Abbott of Baumgarten in 1794, his young imagination is instantly captivated by the grandeur of the monastic vocation. In a fit of enthusiasm, he implores his mother to bring the monks to their family seat at Carmadon in Devon. Little does Hirst know the struggles facing Catholics in that heavily Protestant county in the west of England. Little, too, does he know what God will ask of him for the realization of his dream: nothing less than everything.

First published in 1940, The Spark in the Reeds is a novel rich with the penitential spirit of twentieth-century Catholicism. Full of a keen awareness of the spiritual value of suffering and a heroic generosity in the magnanimous desire for the salvation of souls, it offers the twenty-first century a vibrant window into what faith under pressure can be.