Going Astray

Laura and Malcolm are everyday people whose lives are turned upside down when the church community they sign into becomes more and more un-Christlike in its behaviour. When her toddler's life is risked by the church leaders, Laura knows she has to escape. But already the community has become a prison, and she becomes more and more frantic in the struggle against her husband's and son's disinterest in leaving, her growing attraction to another man, and her confusion about basic Christian gifts of the Spirit. Faced with decisions that will rip apart her family, Laura acts: but her breathtaking struggle to escape tears apart the family, as this story of betrayal builds to a terrifying climax.

Autorentext

I was born Christine Birtles in 1948 and was brought up with my younger sister in Central London until a move to the southern suburbs when I was four. I enjoyed my childhood and teenage years in the atmosphere of the 'suburban Bible belt'. I became a Christian with a real but private faith when I was nine, then joined Crusaders and had a lively nineteen-sixties social life with loving parents, father being an opera singer at Covent Garden and abroad. His stage name was Michael Langdon and the whole family's name was changed to Langdon by deedpoll in 1964. I was pleased to lose the name Birtles - no-one could spell it! I was and am fascinated with how the world appears to other people and different standpoints from my own. Part of that impels me to write. I started with religious differences and control, then moved to research (and what might be permissible) and a third book about good and evil influences, what are they and how do we respond. All examined through fiction.