Marnie’s Place is a refuge for the mentally vulnerable alienated from the helter skelter of urban life. Set in the future, the book unfolds like a series of parables meant to both humour and inspire. Its heroes are the people the world has shut out, characters who to protect themselves take on some rather unique disguises. Included in their number are an ambassador to a Belgian Queen, ‘Maybe’ perhaps the only ever Canadian Philosopher, Aristotle the second and others.

Focal to the community is a renegade theologian, who connects all life’s experience to God’s way with us, especially those on the fraying edge of madness.

Though not a book on mental illness, it is written with a profound compassion for those mentally ill, allowing that but for a twist in our life’s experience, or a slight variation in the biochemistry of our brains, ‘there go you and I’. Reading the book, you may wish to book a room.

The story line slowly weaves the various characters into a community that for most of them is the first place they can call home. But alone as they are, even they are not immune to the divisive forces that work to divide us all. Their ‘salvation’ is no less than our own – God’s mercy through people who have found mercy.