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In the case of Widows & Orphans, [Duncan]'s crew is a motley team of journalists who are struggling to keep afloat the newspaper that Duncan inherited from his father and grandfather. [Michael Arditti] certainly has a talent for throwing disparate characters together: a love affair on a pilgrimage to Lourdes in Jubilate; a gay curate, a stuck-up couple and a homeless man in a church, in Easter; and now, a small, dysfunctional family of hacks. \"I wanted to write about what it is to be in a community today,\" he says. \"And a newspaper became a wonderful nucleus because it's both reporting social changes and affected by them.\" Despite having worked for newspapers since becoming the Evening Standard's deputy drama critic in the 1980s (as well as being a successful playwright), he has hardly ever visited a newspaper office and spent some time at two London papers to get a flavour for this novel. \"There's a very important character, to me, the little girl with cerebral palsy,\" he says. \"I actually spent much more time talking to speech therapists and people who knew about cerebral palsy because it's sort of iniquitous if you get those sorts of things wrong.\" I suspect that Bible readers often become writers and lovers of words, and Arditti agrees. To him, it's a combination of the \"mystery\" in the words, the \"richness\" of the stories and a sense of \"interpreting something bigger, and thinking about a world outside yourself\". He adds: \"I think we're very lucky to have it ... But also it's done a lot of damage. Sorry, that's wrong, the way people have used it has done a lot of damage.\"

The tour began with three days in Beijing and its environs, comprising trips to the Forbidden City, Great Wall, Temple of Heaven and Ming tombs. The first surprise was how little of China's imperial heritage remained in the city. Eroded building materials, foreign invasions and Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution have all taken their toll. With Chiang Kai-Shek having transported to Taiwan the treasures that the British and French left behind, the Forbidden City is as much a mausoleum as Chairman Mao's tomb in nearby Tiananmen Square. Ulan Bator is the coldest capital city in the world, its winter temperatures regularly drop to minus 40C, but on my summer visit it was hot and humid. I toured Buddhist monasteries and temples, whose evil-looking masks and statues attest to the persistence of ancient animist beliefs; I watched newlywed couples being photographed beside a monumental stature of Genghis Khan which, to Western eyes, did not augur well for a tranquil marriage; I ate at a local grill where chefs wearing \"Kiss me I'm a Mongolian\" T-shirts mixed cooking with lightness of touch. A range of options are available for travelling on the Trans-Siberian, from local journeys aboard rattly old trains that need no advance booking, to private trains such as the Tsar's Gold. Railbookers (020 3327 0869; railbookers.com), offers the Trans-Siberian journey from Beijing to Moscow, on board the Tsar's Gold, for 5,999pp. The 14-night trip includes hotel accommodation in Beijing, Ulan Bator, Irkutsk and Moscow, and a \"Superior Plus\" cabin aboard the train. The price also includes off-train excursions, all meals and a \"generous drink allowance\".

Having just read Michael Arditti's harrowing account of his mother's final days I had to respond with an opposite account (\"Agony of watching my dying mother stripped of dignity\" May 8). Nothing can make dying easy and nothing can help ease Michael's pain and that of countless others but some people do die with dignity, surrounded by loving and caring professionals.

First published in 1993, [MICHAEL ARDITTI]'s debut placed faith and sexuality centre stage in a deeply unfashionable way. The novel's nameless narrator is a serious-minded ordinand who suffers a nervous collapse at the altar.

Such equivocation is part of the Filipino mindset. A character in The Breath of Night commenting on his country's chequered colonial past, under first the Spanish and then the Americans, refers bitterly to its having \"spent 300 years in a convent and 50 in Hollywood\". Yet, while Filipinos may express a deeply ambivalent attitude towards their former colonial rulers, they have wholeheartedly embraced their religion and it is in the ubiquitous fiestas that convent devotion and Hollywood spectacle display a uniquely Philippine stamp. During my visit, the parish priest, having whipped the crowd into a frenzy with questions such as \"Are you keen to get married?\" and \"Who wants to have a baby?\", led them into the church and conducted mass. At the end, he discreetly disappeared to be replaced by the baylan, a pagan high priestess. In full view of the congregation, she rubbed the women's stomachs and men's genitals. As for Christians throughout the world, the most sacred Filipino festival is Easter. Every province celebrates in its own way. Arguably the most interesting is the Moriones festival, held on Marinduque. This sleepy island is best known as the country's main exporter of butterflies. For more than two centuries the inhabitants have held a Holy Week festival in honour of St Longinus. He was the Roman centurion whose spear pierced Jesus's side. The festival includes a passion play, a procession of flagellants and, most bizarrely, a musical war of the Moriones, in which groups of heavily masked young Filipinos wearing Roman helmets and breastplates, along with flip-flops, disco-dance in a sports field.

Dripping in Catholic kitsch - glow-in-the-dark madonnas and alarm clocks that ring the Ave Maria every hour - Lourdes holds a fascination for Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Its mix of ugliness, tat, desperation, flashes of beauty, hope and unmet expectations make it the perfect backdrop for a book that explores questions of faith, loyalty, love and theodicy. [Michael Arditti]'s main narrative device is to alternate between [Gillian] and [Vincent]'s voices, as they recount the circumstances that brought them together. While sometimes confusing, this allows him to explore their pasts and their changing feelings towards each other (and the cosmos), as well as the microcosm of Lourdes.