This, truly, is a bedside book of saints, crafted like an old-fashioned quilt -- a colorful thing of threads and patches meant to brighten the bedroom and lift the spirits of souls wearied by the day.

Like the patchwork quilts made by your grandmother, these tales have been sewn together without great study and with very little plan: variety and charm are often the very thing needed to cheer a downcast soul and bring consolation and hope to the Christian who takes up a book just before falling asleep.

In these pages, Fr. Aloysius Roche shows you the saints not so much from a new angle as from a less familiar one, a comfortable angle that makes for a certain coziness. Without diluting the intensity and holiness of the saints, he tries to bring them near, to bring them home, to bring them to your very bedside.

So he lets the saints themselves do most of the talking. "I am like a parrot who has learned to speak," wrote St. Teresa. Exactly! In writing