Lives of the Improbable Saints by Richard Coles

Lives of the Improbable Saints Reviews

• 
  Voirrey

  Richard Cole manages to make the Improbable Saints both fascinating and amusing, without ever disparaging the idea that their stories are meant to encourage others.
  
  You can open any page at random and find yourself smiling. Who could resist St Fiacre, patron saint of piles, or St Ita, consumed by a beetle that grew as big as a pig? Or St Dominic of the Causeway, patron saint of Spanish engineers, who once restored a roast chicken to life? My favourite is probably St Mary of Egypt - a prostitute 'so enthusiastic in her job that she quite often obliged without charging and so had to spin flax to make ends meet.'
  
  A book for dipping into at regular intervals. And for going back to even once you've read it all once.
• 
  Carolyn

  It’s a fun little bathroom book. Full of odd snippets about some rather unusual saints.
• 
  Jamie Howison

  This collection of snippets on the most improbable of saints began when Richard Coles (co-founder of the 80s pop group The Communards, and now both an Anglican priest and a BBC radio host...) was required by an employer to write daily pieces for Twitter and Facebook. As you'd imagine, each entry can be read in under a minute, even if you do take time to relish the illustrations provided by Ted Harrison. Anything but heavy reading, in other words, but fun all the same. Does Coles believe most of the stories and legends he records. I'll let him answer: "No, I don't. But I do think that all these stories, legends, and lives enabled people remote from us in time, place and custom to experience the reality of God coming into focus, experiences significant enough for them to be preserved, if sometimes haphazardly."
• 
  Mark Lawson

  An interesting, fun read full of these bizarre legends of various lesser known saints told with a wonderful dry British wit. The only shortcoming was I wanted to know more about these saints. Wasn't too sure what got them to be canonized beyond the often bizarre ways in which they died (and what happened to their corpses afterwards).
  
  Bonus for teaching me the term cephalophore who is someone who walks around with their head after decapitation. It happened with enough saints that they needed a term for it
• 
  Marc

  Cursory collection of chatty blog posts that for the most part don't have much more rigour than an article on the back of a matchbox (or bottle of holy water). A few have their feast days given, others mention what they are patron saint of, but there's no consistency. Horrible typesetting and middling illos too.
• 
  Judith

  I found this book a hoot - just hope improbable can you get?