Megan Banning

Awakening from a 15-year coma, scientist Johnny Dalton discovers that his life has been illusory and that he is merely a clone of the real Dr. Dalton. With the help of rebel leader Nikki Holland, Dalton sets out to find his maker in a futuristic society fraught with danger and secrecy.

In this forceful study of religious passion an extraordinary spiritual experience is placed in the center of a deftly evoked natural world, namely, rural upstate New York just after the turn of the century. At summer's end, when she is 17, Mariette Baptiste, educated daughter of the local doctor, enters the cloistered convent of Our Lady of the Afflictions as a postulant. Her religious fervor, understated but determined, makes an impact on the small community of nuns whose days and nights are measured in a round of prayer and farm work changing only with the seasons. Their ordered life is disrupted, however, as Mariette begins to fall into a series of trances from which she awakens with stigmata, which heal as spontaneously as they appear. The feelings of skepticism, jealousy and adoration evoked in the nuns, Mariette's own response and that of the Mother Superior are delicately, indelibly presented.

This spirited comedy poses the age old question: if dogs are man's best friends, what happens when a man trades places with one, and literally lives "a dog's life"?