I’m a novelist, essayist, and journalist who’s written extensively about the problems and consolations of faith, about belonging in and out of faith, and about the tribes of what I think of as the In Between. When you’re in between, you’re neither in it nor out of it, whatever “it” might be for you. You bear an “infinity of traces,” as the writer Antonio Gramsci called these formative influences. My first novel looks at these influences directly, while my second one looks at them indirectly. I’m late in the game with a third novel now—a detective story that investigates a murder along with these same themes.
Indispensable. And the scandal of this autobiographical novel hasn’t worn off in a hundred-plus years. Stephen Dedalus is our young man, the self-appointed artist-priest. We see turn-of-the-century Ireland through his eyes and Irish Catholicism, too, each with its special richness and oppressiveness. Ultimately, it’s Stephen’s desire to escape "these nets" that drives his story. He’ll find God in his own way or, failing that, replace him with Art.
A masterpiece of modern fiction, James Joyce's semiautobiographical first novel follows Stephen Dedalus, a sensitive and creative youth who rebels against his family, his education, and his country by committing himself to the artist's life.
"I will not serve," vows Dedalus, "that in which I no longer believe...and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can." Likening himself to God, Dedalus notes that the artist "remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." Joyce's rendering of the impressions of…
One of my permanent, permanent favorites. Cather’s novel about a pair of French Catholic missionaries in 19th-century New Mexico is a lot of things: a portrait of a complex and life-giving friendship, a “loveship,” if I can borrow from Alice Munro.
It’s also an immersive historical treatment of Catholic proselytizing in the Southwest and a lyric poem about the beauty of that land. It’s smart about the rigors and consolations and the inevitable condescension of missionary work. It’s smart about everything. A perfect book.
From one of the most highly acclaimed novelists of the twentieth century—"a truly remarkable book" (The New York Times),an epic—almost mythic—story of a single human life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert.
In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows—gently, all the while contending with an unforgiving landscape,…
My book is fantastical historical fiction about two characters who're wrestling with the monstrosity of their grief.
It takes you into London high society, where Ambrose tries to forget about how much he misses Bennett and how much he dreads becoming as cold as their Grandfather. It takes you to…
Robinson’s long-awaited second novel arrived in the foursquare voice of a late-in-life preacher—and was instantly unforgettable. The Rev. John Ames is writing a series of letters to the son he won’t live long enough to know as an adult.
A novel of almost sneaky power and warmth, Gilead is remarkable, too, for its unmixed praise of the devotional life.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION and THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK
In 1956, towards the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son: 'I told you last night that I might be gone sometime . . . You reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in my life saw on any other face besides your mother's. It's a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern. I'm always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after…
A spirit of comédie humaine suffuses this collection of short stories set largely among Orthodox Jewish communities. Englander has an affectionate comic touch, and that’s obvious here.
Just as important is his gift for limning out the pain of people pulled between the comfort of belonging on the one hand and, on the other, the urge, perhaps the need to rebel.
Ruchama, a wigmaker from an ultra-orthodox Brooklyn enclave, journeys into Manhattan for inspiration, frequenting a newsstand where she flips through forbidden fashion magazines. An elderly Jew with a long, white beard reluctantly works as a department store Santa Claus every year - until he can take it no longer. And a Hasidic man, frustrated by his wife's lack of interest, gets a dispensation from a rabbi to see a prostitute for the relief of unbearable urges.
This book is a literary historical novel. It is set in Britain immediately after World War II, when people – gay, straight, young, and old - are struggling to get back on track with their lives, including their love lives. Because of the turmoil of the times, the number of…
A bit of a curveball entry, but go with it. One of the subplots in Smith’s impressively sprawling historical novel involves do-gooder Baptists who really are doing good! They’re in Anglican England to agitate for the end of slavery in the British colonies—and they’re ahead of their time in other ways, too.
They help to platform the voices of freedmen and escaped slaves, acting as allies, essentially. It’s in the main character of Eliza that the larger novel takes up this search for a liberatory truth, nominally Christian but really entrusted to anyone who can see the suffering of others and refuse to look away.
From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story—and who gets to be believed
It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years.
Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of…
Two missionaries in Brazil begin to chafe against each other and their message as the United States builds up to the war in Iraq. Elder McLeod, an American, and Elder Passos, a Brazilian, each come to their Mormon faith from different backgrounds, at the end of very different childhoods—and each wants and expects different things from their missionary service among the poor of southeast Brazil.
Their time together builds to a drastic climax that neither of these young men anticipates, and neither quite chooses. A story about cross-cultural friendship, as much as the difficult search for faith, my book continues to resonate as a portrait of youthful idealism in the face of violence.
The Road from Belhaven is set in 1880s Scotland. Growing up in the care of her grandparents on Belhaven Farm, Lizzie Craig discovers as a small girl that she can see the future. But she soon realises that she must keep her gift a secret. While she can sometimes glimpse…
