Five For Sorrow, Ten For Joy: A Novel

Lise was merely Elizabeth Fanshawe, a young Englishwoman with a spirit of adventure, before she became La Balafrée—the Scarred One—one of post-War Paris's most notorious and successful madams. Lise is drawn into the devastating, wicked world of prostitution after an accidental encounter with Patrice Ambard, whose mesmerising attractiveness hides an inevitable sadism. Only after a heinous act does she find freedom, followed by rest and regeneration at the convent of Belle Source as Soeur Marie Lise of the Sisters of Béthanie. There, she tells her sorrowful and dismal narrative in a captivating succession of flashbacks.

Yet even as she makes peace with the past, the legacy of sin and destruction is rearing its head to strike at the very heart of Béthanie. Combining extraordinary empathy with relentless candor, Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy is a beautifully wrought account of sin and mercy, showing that with God the impossible is not only possible—but it happens.