The Rabbi

Frances and Bernard

Carlene Bauer · 209 pages

In the summer of 1957, Frances and Bernard meet at an artists' colony. She finds him faintly ridiculous, but talented. He sees her as aloof, but intriguing. Afterward, he writes her a letter. Soon they are immersed in the kind of fast, deep friendship that can take over-- and change the course of-- lives. They find their way to New York and, for a few whirling years, each other. Can we love anothe

Absolute Truths

Susan Howatch · 669 pages

A Life Force

Will Eisner · 139 pages

Chronicles the lives of ordinary people surviving the Great Depression in the Bronx, portraying the economic collapse, leftist politics, and rise in Nazism.

Go Tell It on the Mountain

James Baldwin · 226 pages

In one of the greatest American classics, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power

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

Evelyn Waugh · 370 pages

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

The Devil's Advocate

Morris West · 319 pages

*The Devil's Advocate*, Morris West's best-selling novel, is a deft exploration of the meaning of faith. In an impoverished village in southern Italy, the life and death of Giacomo Nerone has inspired talk of saint­hood. Father Blaise Meredith, a dying English priest, is sent from the Vatican to investigate—and to try to untangle the web of facts, rumors, and outright lies that surround Nerone's l

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

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

Kaaterskill Falls

Allegra Goodman · 324 pages

In the summer of '76, the Shulmans and the Melishes migrate to Kaaterskill, the tiny town in upstate New York where Orthodox Jews and Yankee year-rounders live side by side from June through August. Elizabeth Shulman, a devout follower of Rav Elijah Kirshner and the mother of five daughters, is restless. She needs a project of her own, outside her family and her cloistered community. Across the st

Bless Me, Ultima

Rudolfo Anaya · 252 pages

Ultima, a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic, comes to Antonio Marez's New Mexico family when he is six years old, and she helps him discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past.

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

Job: The Story of a Simple Man

Joseph Roth · 238 pages

The Nun's Story

Kathryn Hulme · 339 pages

Novel about a nun who is finally dispensed from her vows because she does not feel that she can quite achieve the abnegation required.

The Gospel According to the Son

Norman Mailer · 242 pages

Norman Mailer fused fact and fiction to create indelible portraits of such figures as Marilyn Monroe, Gary Gilmore, and Lee Harvey Oswald. In The Gospel According to the Son, Mailer re-imagines, as no other modern author has, the key character of Western history. Here is Jesus Christ’s story in his own words: the discovery of his divinity and the painful, powerful journey to accepting and expressi

Saint Maybe

Anne Tyler · 337 pages

Saint Maybe is the rich and absorbing story of a young man's guilt over his brother's death and his struggle to atone for the wrong he feels he has done. On a quiet street in Baltimore in 1965, seventeen-year-old Ian Bedloe lives with his family in an "ideal, apple-pie household," enjoying the comfort of family traditions and indulging in all the usual dreams of the future. Until one night, when I

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

Omensetter's Luck

William H. Gass · 304 pages

Greeted as a masterpiece when it was first published in 1966, Omensetter's Luck is the quirky, impressionistic, and breathtakingly original story of an ordinary community galvanized by the presence of an extraordinary man. Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it chronicles - through the voices of various participants and observers - the confrontation between Brackett Omensetter, a man of pretern

The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell

Robert Dugoni · 448 pages

The Keys of the Kingdom

A.J. Cronin · 344 pages

A young Catholic Priest is sent to China as a missionary and has many adventures there and this is ccontrasted with the easy and worldly life of an old friend who rises through the Catholic hierachy back in Scotland. A very thought provoking book and possibly Cronin's best work.

Elders

Ryan McIlvain · 293 pages

Elder McLeod--outspoken, surly, a brash American--is nearing the end of his mission in Brazil when he is given a new partner--Elder Passos, a devout, ambitious Brazilian who found salvation and solace in the church after his mother's early death. The two men are at first suspicious of each other, and their work together is frustrating, fruitless. That changes when a beautiful woman and her husband

The Sparrow

Mary Doria Russell · 428 pages

The Sparrow is a novel about a remarkable man, a living saint, a life-long celibate and Jesuit priest, who undergoes an experience so harrowing and profound that it makes him question the existence of God. This experience--the first contact between human beings and intelligent extraterrestrial life--begins with a small mistake and ends in a horrible catastrophe.

Barabbas

Par Lagerkvist · 149 pages

Barabbas, the thief, was acquitted when Christ was crucified, but he cannot put the thought of that man out of his mind. He finds himself drawn to the Christians who remain.

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