This volume is the inspirational life story of the Vietnamese Redemptorist Marcel Van, who died in a North Vietnamese prison camp in 1959. The first steps towards his Beatification were begun in 1984. Combining an extreme sensitivity with an inane but saint-like audacity, his life was spent in silence against a backcloth of political turmoil until his death in the prison camp.

What moves us first of all in these 'Conversations' is, in the words of Father Boucher CSsR, Van's spiritual director, 'The unbelievable familiarity and ... the tenderness of which Brother Marcel has been the object on the part of his heavenly interlocutors. On reading the little sheets that he handed over to me each week I had the feeling that this very small Redemptorist brother whom Jesus, Mary and Therese were leading by the hand would have a role to play in the Church and in the world.' Indeed, 'Jesus, from the time of his first conversation, expressed to him his wish to choose him to...