The extraordinary New York Times bestselling masterpiece from “one of the most eloquent yet earthbound spiritual writers of our time” (San Francisco Chronicle).

Kathleen Norris had written several much loved books, yet she couldn’t drag herself out of bed in the morning, couldn’t summon the energy for her daily tasks. Even as she struggled, Norris recognized her familiar battle with acedia, a word she had discovered in early Church text years earlier. Fascinated by this “noonday demon”, so familiar to those in the early and medieval Church, Norris knew she must restore this forgotten but important concept to the modern world’s vernacular. An examination of acedia in the light of psychology, spirituality, the healing powers of religious practice, and Norris’s own experience, Acedia & Me is both intimate and historically sweeping, brimming with exasperation and reverence, sometimes funny, often provocative, and always insightful.

“A deeply spiritual, deeply moving book” about life on the Great Plains, by the New York Times bestselling author of The Cloister Walk (The New York Times Book Review).

“With humor and lyrical grace,” Kathleen Norris meditates on a place in the American landscape that is at once desolate and sublime, harsh and forgiving, steeped in history and myth (San Francisco Chronicle). A combination of reporting and reflection, Dakota reminds us that wherever we go, we chart our own spiritual geography.