"Other girls can type sixty words a minute. I can come ten times an hour." Thus speaks Thea Morton, a randy, greedy, mixed-up child-woman who is part Wife of Bath, part ecstatic St Teresa, forever hoping to bump into God. For Thea, sex and religious experience are one. "You soar beyond your own confining body and hit the electric fence which runs round heaven." So when she meets Ray Murphy, an intense ascetic Franciscan friar, with red hair and green socks, she regards him as the obvious route to the Godhead. To seduce Ray would be a miracle, so she pursues him to Lourdes. There, amidst the sick and handicapped, she witnesses not a miracle but a vision, and is entrusted with a mission which changes her whole life. But when she tries to tell the world she has seen St Bernadette, she's regarded as a lunatic - or worse. Purple is the colour of passion, penance and panache, and After Purple is a highly coloured story of sex, religion and violence, combining outrageous comedy with an impassioned quest for God.
