The Last Temptation of Christ

The Chosen

Chaim Potok · 284 pages

It's about two jewish boys from different jewish sects with very differing doctrine. The kids meet in the unlikely circumstance of a baseball game, and a terrible accident, that leads them to be lifelong friends

Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Evelyn Waugh · 370 pages

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

Jose Saramago · 341 pages

Franny and Zooey

J.D. Salinger · 202 pages

Franny came out in The New Yorker in 1955, and was swiftly followed in 1957 by Zooey. Both stories are early entries in a narrative series about the Glasses, a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York. In the first story, Franny, a young college girl, arrives in New Haven (Yale) to be with her boyfriend for a football weekend, where they go to a café. The story is essentially an account of

The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne · 272 pages

Gilead

Marilynne Robinson · 256 pages

**WINNER OF THE 2005 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION** In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He “preached men into the Civi

The Pilgrim's Progress

John Bunyan · 308 pages

Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe · 192 pages

Things Fall Apart is the debut novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, first published in 1958. It depicts pre-colonial life in the southeastern part of Nigeria and the arrival of Europeans during the late 19th century. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first to receive global critical acclaim. It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and is widel

The Color Purple

Alice Walker · 274 pages

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeenth because of the sometimes explicit content, particula

The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver · 596 pages

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of on

The Damnation of Theron Ware: Or Illumination

Harold Frederic, Stanton Garner · 352 pages

Theron Ware is a promising young Methodist pastor recently assigned to a congregation is small town in the Adirondack Mountains. His education has been limited and his experiences limited to church society and his strict enforcement of its norms. Theron has a number of experiences that cause him to begin to question the Methodist religion, his role as a minister and the existence of God. His "i

The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 809 pages

The Power and the Glory

Graham Greene · 228 pages

One of Greene’s most powerful novels, the book takes as its theme the era of religious suppression in Mexico during the early 1930’s. An unnamed Catholic priest, an alcoholic with a shameful past in search of either oblivion or redemption, travels through Mexico administering the rites of the church to the poor landless peasants, hunted by a remorseless police officer and always in fear of being b

The Plague

Albert Camus · 278 pages

The Plague (French: La Peste) is a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947, that tells the story of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. It asks a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. The characters in the book, ranging from doctors to vacationers to fugitives, all help to show the effects the plague has on a populace.

Ulysses

James Joyce · 736 pages

Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, this book has survived bowdlerization, legal action and controversy. The novel deals with the events of one day in Dublin, 16th June 1904, now known as "Bloomsday". The principal characters are Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly. Ulysses has been labelled dirty, blasphemous and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge Jo

A Case of Conscience

James Blish · 192 pages

The citizens of the planet Lithia are some of the most ethical sentient beings Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez has ever encountered. True, they have no literature, no fine arts, and don't understand the concept of recreation, but neither do they understand the concepts of greed, envy, lust, or any of the sins and vices that plague humankind. Their world seems darned near perfect. And that is just what d

The Robe

Lloyd C. Douglas · 542 pages

A Roman soldier, Marcellus, wins Christ's robe as a gambling prize. He then sets forth on a quest to find the truth about the Nazarene's robe-a quest that reaches to the very roots and heart of Christianity and is set against the vividly limned background of ancient Rome. Here is a timeless story of adventure, faith, and romance, a tale of spiritual longing and ultimate redemption.

The Spire

William Golding · 224 pages

Told in a stream-of-consciousness narrative, this is a story of obsession. Against the advice of his builder, the Dean of Salisbury Cathedral, slowly dying from tuberculosis, plans the construction of a towering spire atop the cathedral as the culmination of his life’s work but becomes increasingly deranged as the construction faces constant problems due to the sheer grandiosity of the work.

The Screwtape Letters

C.S. Lewis · 158 pages

Job: The Story of a Simple Man

Joseph Roth · 238 pages

The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex/Oedipus at Colonus/Antigone

Sophocles · 272 pages

Jude the Obscure

Thomas Hardy · 440 pages

Hardy's last work of fiction, Jude the Obscure is also one of his most gloomily fatalistic, depicting the lives of individuals who are trapped by forces beyond their control. Jude Fawley, a poor villager, wants to enter the divinity school at Christminster. Sidetracked by Arabella Donn, an earthy country girl who pretends to be pregnant by him, Jude marries her and is then deserted. He earns a liv

Paradise Lost

John Milton · 336 pages

John Milton's Paradise Lost is one of the greatest epic poems in the English language. It tells the story of the Fall of Man, a tale of immense drama and excitement, of rebellion and treachery, of innocence pitted against corruption, in which God and Satan fight a bitter battle for control of mankind's destiny. The struggle rages across three worlds - heaven, hell, and earth - as Satan and his ban

Earthly Powers

Anthony Burgess · 656 pages

Anthony Burgess has long been regarded as one of the most original and daring writers of our time. In Earthly Powers, Burgess has writtena book rich with astonishing powers and surprising events.