Our Lady of the Highway

a novel

Hal Hartley

A funny and provocative entertainment about a beautiful but troubled insurance adjuster who believes she has psychic powers she cannot control. She decides to enter a Catholic convent for three months to protect society from her powerful emotions and her devoted math teacher boyfriend hopes this will cure her of these delusions. But the only convent that will accept her is an impoverished cloister run by a gang of outlaw nuns opening a brewery to help finance their radical activist plans.

There is a convent in Brooklyn where the nuns make beer…

For three centuries the sisters of Our Lady of the Highway have been praying for peace twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. In its heyday, the convent was home to forty-eight nuns, each responsible for half an hour of prayer per day, lying face down on the floor before the altar in the basement of their convent. But these days there are only four elderly nuns doing six-hour shifts! They need more sisters. For what will happen to the whole wide world if their prayers cease?

Meanwhile, a powerful businessman wants to buy the convent, tear it down, and build a sewage treatment plant.

The local bishop and a resourceful young priest locate a few nuns who can help maintain the prayer cycle and, hopefully, get the convent back up on its feet. The problem is, they're all wanted by the law. But a cloistered convent like Our Lady of the Highway—where the sisters remain apart from all contact with the secular world—is, of course, a great place to hide outlaw nuns.

But they'll need a go-between, an apprentice nun who has not taken her vows who can run interference with the outside world while they open a microbrewery and market their specialty craft beer to the affluent hipsters of Williamsburg…

Publication Date: June 14, 2022
Publisher: Elboro Press
ISBN: 978-1-7379274-3-3
Perfect Bound Paperback, 316 pages
Dimensions: 5” x 8”
Retail Price: $17.99