The Final Book from Cai Emmons
After five years cloistered in silence, Niall O’Malley has left the monastery behind, but peace won’t let him go. Now a high school history teacher in gritty New Jersey, he finds purpose in the classroom—until a volatile student with dangerous views threatens more than just order. At home, his girlfriend pushes for a shared life with her daughter and aging mother, but Niall, still haunted by his past and the abuse he endured as a monk, finds himself unraveling.
Desperate for clarity, he returns to the monastery he once fled, where his former tormentor, Brother Thomas, is now dying of ALS. What awaits is not peace, but a reckoning.
The Bells is a gripping and lyrical exploration of faith, failure, and the elusive road to forgiveness. It is the final novel from celebrated author Cai Emmons, submitted on the day she died—a luminous and courageous parting gift from one of our most thoughtful literary voices.
As The Bells opens, thirty-three-year-old Niall O’Malley has failed a five-year mission to live as a monk and is attempting to redefine himself as a high school teacher in New Jersey. The transition has been bumpy. He loves teaching history to inner city teens, but he hits a roadblock when a belligerent student, Colton, possibly a white-supremacist, behaves in ways that threaten Niall. As troubles mount at school, Niall’s girlfriend Lluvia pressures him into make a deeper commitment to their relationship. She wants them to move in together with Lluvia’s pre-teen daughter and elderly mother. Haunted by his failure as a Cistercian monk and his troubles with one man in particular, the abusive Brother Thomas, Niall abandons Lluvia and heads back to his old monastery in Massachusetts for a final showdown with Thomas, now dying of ALS. Redemption for Niall is elusive as he strives to mend his faith.
