Saint Margaret of Cortona

The Nobel Prize–winning author’s stirring biography of the thirteenth-century Italian penitent who become the patron saint of the homeless.   Born in 1247 to a farming family in a small village outside Perugia, Margaret of Cortona was willful and reckless in her youth. At age seventeen, she became a wealthy man’s mistress—even bearing his son out of wedlock. But her life of sin ended when she found her lover murdered.   Devoting herself to prayer and penance, Margaret eventually joined