This was Armstrong's first book and, encouraged by its success, she wrote a sequel, Beginning the World. The convent years are briefly summarised, as a full account of them has been given in Through the Narrow Gate. But, even then, she occasionally wondered if God wasn't rather like the emperor's new clothes: nobody dared admit that he wasn't there. At the time she blamed it on herself, on her scattered mind and heart and lack of inner silence. This she first noticed at the convent, where she could not admit 'the shameful secret that, unlike the other sisters, I could not pray'. And the chief relationship is with a being who is conspicuous by his absence. Her readership widened further with her life of the Buddha.īut it's her own spiritual journey which she traces here.

In response, she took time out from A History of God to write, for a western audience, a life of the Prophet Mohammed, which she has since followed with a short history of Islam. This she abhorred, but she also noted how the counter-attack by Rushdie's champions quickly segued into a denunciation of Islam itself. Her research sensitised her to the debates surrounding the fatwa on Salman Rushdie.

Yet, by the end, she has become an impressive phenomenon: a self-taught theologian and author of a string of books, among them A History of God, which strides through four millennia and across three faiths - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - with contagious gusto and immense learning.

The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong