Sign-In
Cart
Sanctum
Paperback
General FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher: Bernspen
Published: Nov 18 2025
Pages: 84
Weight: 0.24
Height: 0.20 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Paolo Santiago was a man built for belief. For four years, his work inside the Curia Ecclesiae-the administrative heart of the archdiocese-felt like proximity to something sacred. Then he finds the numbers that don't add up. A children's charity fund, quietly diverted. A cover-up, filed away and forgotten. A mentor who has perfected the art of sounding reasonable while answering nothing at all.
What begins as a crisis of conscience becomes something harder: the slow, costly work of building a life-and an ethics-from scratch, without the certainty he's always leaned on. A secondhand bookstore. A blunt, overextended nonprofit director named Eliza who has no patience for performed virtue. A soup kitchen where a stranger's two words mean more than a cathedral full of liturgy. And, eventually, an old threat comes due-a real test of whether the goodness Paolo has been practicing is something he actually believes, or only something he needed to believe while he was angry.
Sanctum is a quiet, unflinching novel about institutional betrayal, the particular loneliness of leaving what you love, and the harder question underneath it: can a person simply choose to be good-without a mandate, a reward, or anyone keeping score?
Also in
General Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
John Updike: Novels 1978-1984 (Loa #339): The Coup / Rabbit Is Rich / The Witches of Eastwick
Updike, John
Hardcover
Selected Writings: Robert Musil: Young Torless, Three Women, the Perfecting of a Love, and Other Writings
Musil, Robert
Agee, Joel
Paperback