In 1956, toward the end of Rev. John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. This is also the tale of wisdom forged during his solitary life and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.

Arthur's seduction of an innocent, young country girl results in remorse, suffering, and regret. According to The Oxford Companion to English Literature, "the plot is founded on a story told to George Eliot by her aunt Elizabeth Evans, a Methodist preacher, and the original of Dinah Morris of the novel, of a confession of child-murder, made to her by a girl in prison." The story's plot follows four characters' rural lives in the fictional community...

The narrative follows Bishop Jean Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant, friends since their childhood in France, as they organize the new Roman Catholic diocese of Santa Fe subsequent to the Mexican War. While seeking to revive the church and build a cathedral in the desert, the clerics, like their historical prototypes, Bishop Jean Laury and Father Joseph Machebeuf, face religious corruption, natural adversity, and the loneliness of living in a strange...

Hester Prynne is the adulteress, forced by the Puritan community to wear a scarlet letter A on the breast of her gown. Arthur Dimmesdale, the minister and the secret father of her child, Pearl, struggles with the agony of conscience and his own weakness. Roger Chillingworth, Hester's husband, revenges himself on Dimmesdale by calculating assaults on the frail mental state of the conscience-stricken cleric. The result is an American tragedy of stark...

Raised in the South with strong religious influences, Michele Andrea Bowen makes her literary debut with Church Folk. Weaving together the turbulent 1960s Civil Rights movement with the chaos within the Greater Hope Gospel United Church, Bowen carries a message of hope that transcends human failings. Young, handsome Rev. Theophilus Simmons and his new bride Essie settle into pastoral life as the “first couple” of the congregation. Although Theophilus...

A dying man enters the First Church of Raymond and challenges the members of the congregation to stop singing about dedication to Jesus, and start living it, and that one challenge changes their lives forever.

For twenty years, Anna Bouverie has been the dutiful wife of a village rector, scraping by on his pitiful salary, making cakes for the church bake sales, ironing her husband's surplices, and clothing herself and her children in hand-me-downs. But when an expected promotion to archdeacon falls through, her husband retreats into bitterness. Faced with isolation, the lost hope of a better life, and the bullying of her daughter at school, Anna finally...

Words, Wisconsin, an anonymous town of only a few hundred people. But under its sleepy surface, life rages. Cora and Grahm guard their dairy farm, and family, from the wicked schemes of their milk co-op. Lifelong paraplegic Olivia suddenly starts to question her life, only to find herself crippled by her fury toward her sister and caretaker, Violet. Recently retired Rusty finds something unexpected living in his haymow, dredging up haunting childhood...

In Sawgamet the cold of winter breaks the glass of the schoolhouse thermometer, and the dangers of working in the cuts are overshadowed by the mysteries and magic lurking in the woods. Stephen, a pastor, is at home on the eve of his mother's funeral, thirty years after his grandfather returned to the town in search of his long-dead wife. Touch introduces you to a world where monsters and witches oppose singing dogs and golden caribou, where the living...

Oscar Hopkins is a high-strung preacher's kid with hydrophobia and noisy knees. Lucinda Leplastrier is a frizzy-haired heiress who impulsively buys a glass factory with the inheritance forced on her by a well-intentioned adviser. In the early parts of this lushly written book, author Peter Carey renders the seminal turning points in his protagonists' childhoods as exquisite 19th-century set pieces. Young Oscar, denied the heavenly fruit of a Christmas...