2023 llumination Book Awards Silver Medal Winner, 2024 Hawthorne Prize Shortlister.
What is it like to have a saint for a sister? This is the question I set out to explore when the idea for this novel came to me – and wouldn’t leave me until I wrote it.
Set in nineteenth and twentieth-century France, Sketches draws us into the brief life and powerful legacy of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897), a French Carmelite nun who remains a much-loved figure in and beyond the Catholic Church, and a figure who has caught at my own heart for many years. Instead of writing a straightforward or lightly fictionalised biography, I was determined to follow Thérèse’s story through the voices of six characters who knew her well: her sisters Marie, Pauline, Léonie, and Céline; a young cousin; and a troubled seminarian with whom she corresponds towards the end of her life. In doing so, each of these characters came to life for me, as I researched their individual journeys and allowed them to speak. A fiery artist; a soft-centred earth mother, a prim leader, a flighty singer, a challenged misfit, and a stumbling missionary – they all knew and loved Thérèse who is the luminous centre around which their lives pivot.
As it developed, my novel plaited their own stories around that of a young woman called directly to sanctity, weaving in the mysteries of grace, silence, and sunlight.
Read an extract from my novel here.
Read a short reflection about my process of writing this novel at the Open University’s Creative Writing Tutor’s blog.
Read an interview about my novel at Word On Fire’s Evangelisation and Culture website.
“Catching convincing details and feelings never considered in official accounts, Saint Thérèse’s family leaps from the pages of history in these luminous ‘sketches.’ You don’t have to know Thérèse’s history to enjoy this perceptive imagining of the lives of those closest to her, drawn, in all their humanity, with an always merciful eye.”
–Melaney Poli, author of Playing a Part: A Novel
“Bereft after their mother’s early death, five sisters discern who belongs within the enclosure of a different sisterhood in this deftly written historical and biographical novel. There, another mother, ‘the Wolf, ‘ welcomes one after another into Carmel. The youngest, Thérèse, must convince her father and papal Father of her true vocation, while Celine shrugs off romance for art or convent, or both. Law’s masterful juxtapositions of interior/exterior life causes one to wonder who is truly ‘called.'”
–Marie Laure, author of Return from Exile: Revelations from an Anchoress in St. Augustine
“Sarah Law has crafted a shimmering mosaic from the lives of those closest to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, and every sunlit shard sparks the jeweled whole. The Martin sisters and others rise alive in these pages, each vividly imagined character struggling with challenges of her own. The fragmentary narrative brilliantly carries both their absorbing stories and new ways of seeing the fascinating saint who continues to inspire millions.”
–Laura Reece Hogan, author of I Live, No Longer I
“I lost myself completely in the world of Sarah Law’s Sketches from a Sunlit Heaven, a luminous historical novel of family love and religious devotion. Wonderfully intelligent, beautifully written, and full of wisdom, it is a worthy tribute to its extraordinary subject.”
–Michael Hughes, author of Country: A Novel
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Sarah Law 