Prisoner of God is a revolutionary testimony against the Church and its methods, against the brainwashing to which many members are submitted, and the power and influence it exerts across a broad spectrum of society. It is also an account of the mysterious world of the abbeys: the monks' everyday life and the way they deal with solitude, silence and sexuality. A brilliant student with a promising career ahead of him as a biologist under the guidance of Nobel Prize-winner Jacques Monod, Michel Benoit decided at the age of twenty-two to follow the path of God and take on monastic orders as Brother Irenee. But after twenty-two years of self-sacrifice and a fraught quest for God, Michel was discharged by the Church. What happened? What mechanism led to the Catholic hierarchy rejecting one of its own?

Religious scholar and novelist Michel Benoit was born in Madagascar in 1940. In 1962, having studied Biochemistry under Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod and obtained a PhD in pharmacology, he entered the Benedictine order as an unordained monk, remaining there for twenty-two years. Because of his ideological non-conformity, he eventually quit the Catholic Church and decided to devote himself to research and writing. Already a worldwide bestseller, Prisoner of God follows the runaway national and international success of Benoit's thriller The Thirteenth Apostle.