The Reverend Natalie Cross is no ordinary Anglican priest. With a high-profile job at St Paul’s Cathedral and tipped to become one of the first female bishops in the Church of England, she should be happy. But she’s not.

Natalie’s faith is intricately bound up with her wounded past, and her time as a foreign aid worker among the refugees of Sudan and the Middle East, where her fierce humanity has got her into trouble. When she is drawn into the world of peace-process politics, she loses her liberty and very nearly her life. What will save her? The love of God? Or the brutal self-reliance borne of damage done long ago?

In A Dark Nativity, George Pitcher traces one woman’s descent into the murky world of oppression and terror, where cynical intelligence manipulators operate outside the rule of international law. It is a story of what it is to be in fear of your life. To be a woman in a world full of men who would use and abuse you.

As Natalie discovers, the most dangerous people are not always the ones holding guns, and that sometimes even the darkest acts can lead you towards the light.