Rachel is an ordinary girl who lives in Reading and who is experiencing the ordinary ups and downs of a child in her final years at primary school. When Josh begins to use his magic stones to wish ill to his friends, Rachel challenges him, quietly praying to defuse the harm. A battle ensues throughout the story fiercer than Rachel imagined possible. Then into Rachel's life comes "Christopher", an eccentric, kindly, and delightful angel. Soon, Rachel is not only discovering the power of prayer to transform her own life and those of her friends, but is also visiting and befriending children thousands of miles away, in Jerusalem. Judit Catan is a writer with an extraordinary ear for the simultaneous strangeness and everydayness of spiritual experience, and  Encounter with Angels  is remarkable in its ability to mingle the quotidian with the supernatural and transcendent. Readers will find themselves gripped throughout, until the book's astonishing climax, in which an incomprehensible redemptive power descends, at last, over Reading and Jerusalem.