About the Book: 

The Catching Force arose from a chance meeting in the tropical paradise of Goa between Cosima Somerset, a twice divorced British woman, and Father Joe Pereira, a Catholic priest who ministers to alcoholics and other addicts. “Addiction is a physical ailment as well as a mental one,” he tells her, “ and my approach is to treat the body and the mind through yoga”.

For the next ten years, Cosima follows Father Joe around the world, keeping a highly personal diary of his astonishing healing powers through yoga, while gradually winning his trust and learning his own remarkable story. “I had never met anyone like him before – somebody who embodied the principles of uprightness, goodness, compassion and discipline. I recognised how rare he was and I didn’t want to lose him. In fact, I felt that if I didn’t hang on to him he might disappear in a cloud of dust, and all I would be left with was a pleasant dream.”

The Catching Force is more than a biography about a man of faith and his journey from a small town in India to the slums of Calcutta and Mumbai to work with Mother Teresa and then, following her death, to carry on her work among alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes and thieves. Above all, it is a story of hope, of a healing dynamic arising out of defeat and humiliation; the catching force of unconditional love that enables Father Joe to heal pain through the gift of yoga and to replace desperation with a new life of freedom and happiness. 

Cosima Somerset’s first book is a story of extraordinary depth, power and perception about one man’s love of humanity that guides him through a cruel, unequal and often dangerous world, interweaved with Cosima’s own challenges with debilitating depression. 

About the Author: 

Cosima Somerset is a London-based business entrepreneur. She founded Concierge London in 2000 (recently renamed Somerset White), now operating in London, New York and Los Angeles. She is the mother of two and has had a lifelong passion for reading, dogs of any shape and size, swimming, riding horses, yoga and every animal except spiders (work in progress). 

In the 1980s she worked for Naim Attallah at Quartet Books in Soho, a job from which she was ­fired. She then worked at Interview (the magazine founded by Andy Warhol) for Shelley Wanger and later for the late, great literary agent Gillon Aitken in London, where she learned to proofread – amongst many other skills, like typing – very slowly. In the early 1990s, in London, she worked for ­film maker Belinda Allen researching several television documentaries, including Tory Wives. This is her first book.