'What a good book this makes. It is honest, well informed and beautifully written.' Evening Standard 'A travelogue-cum-autobiography which is both tender and honest. Whether you believe him is irrelevant to the pleasure his book will give.' Daily Telegraph 'Seward's style is an attractive mixture of reportage and travel writing. If he convinces, it is by the velvet elegance of his prose and by his evident sincerity.' Literary Review Seeking reassurance for his waning belief, Seward resolved to visit the seven European shrines where the Virgin had materialised during the twentieth century, beginning with Medjugorje. He hated it on sight but, next morning, was overwhelmed by a powerful sense of peace. His journeys - and this extraordinary, spiritual travel book - end at the shrine of Fatima in Portugal, scene of the earliest manifestation, where that the 'third secret' was given to three peasant children in 1917.

Author Biography

Desmond Seward is best known for The Monks of War (1972), The Wars of the Roses (1995) - both republished by the Folio Society - and A Brief History of the Hundred Years War that has stayed in print in Britain and the United States since its publication in 1978. However, his own favourites among his books are Old Puglia: A Portrait of South Eastern Italy (with Susan Mountgarret, 2009) and Wings over the Desert (2009), an account of his father's experiences as an RFC pilot in Palestine during the First World War. He was born in 1935 in Paris where his father was managing director of Timken Francais, into a family of Anglo-Irish origin that had been wine-merchants at Bordeaux since the 1870s (a background that instilled a lasting love of France) and educated at Ampleforth and at St Catharine's College, Cambridge as an Exhibitioner in History. Unfashionably, harking back to Gibbon and Macaulay, he believes that history is literature - that readability and accessibility are of vital importance.