fiction
Journeying with Father Dan and a coyote along the via negativa
Daniel Hornsby’s debut novel has a wonderful road-trippy feeling.
by Amy Frykholm
Yaa Gyasi’s beautiful novel embraces faith that changes and grows
Transcendent Kingdom explores an immigrant neuroscientist’s complicated relationship with evangelical Christianity.
by Lance Morgan
Marilynne Robinson’s new Gilead novel makes Jack Boughton make sense
Everything in Jack is a marvel.
Are we trapped by the way others see us?
Brit Bennett’s novel explores racial passing, gender transition, and family trauma.
Louise Erdrich’s novel gives names, faces, words, and life to the Chippewa Turtle Mountain Band
A story of survival in the face of termination
Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible is a believable climate fable
The dystopian novel feels about 15 minutes away from becoming reality.
by Amy Peterson
A novel shot through with transcendence
Chelsea Bieker's Godshot drips with truth about motherhood, faith, and power.
Discord on Plymouth Rock
TaraShea Nesbit’s novel about the Mayflower pilgrims and their conflicts
A novel about climate change’s impact on all of us
In Gun Island, Amitav Ghosh practices what he preached in The Great Derangement.
A precise, devastating portrayal of white wokeness
Kiley Reid’s novel about race, class, and good intentions that miss the point
by Rachel Pyle
The line between human and nonhuman
Alice Hoffman’s Holocaust novel collapses the boundaries between reality and fantasy.
A school of death
Colson Whitehead dramatizes a horrifying piece of historical reality.
Back to Margaret Atwood’s Gilead
The Testaments returns to the world of The Handmaid’s Tale. Is this a good idea?
Action without agency
A philosophy professor races through a (predetermined?) action plot
Two-bit hustlers in the church and elsewhere
In Patrick Coleman’s novel, people hurt others with drugs, dollars, and/or Jesus.
Four people, one church
Cara Wall writes beautifully about something novelists rarely address: a mainline Protestant congregation.
by Amy Frykholm
This novel about ridiculously rich people offers no simple lessons
Patrick deWitt is far too smart a writer to offer a sentimental narrative of redemption.
The anguish and ecstasy of the ark’s matriarch
Sarah Blake’s surrealist novel about Naamah—Noah’s wife—is mesmerizing.
by Amy Peterson