Novel Theology

Literature lends shape to our understanding of ideas like love, compassion, forgiveness, redemption. In other words, those markers we encounter in following Christ. All are welcome to join us for any or all of our Novel Theology book discussions this coming year.

The director of Novel Theology is Jerry Byrd, who has been at All Saints’ since 1996. Please feel free to email Jerry Byrd with requests for further information or suggestions for future book discussions.

We meet mostly third Wednesdays of each month, 7:00 8:00 p.m. in the Skylight Room.

2011-12 Reading List

Click the book cover images for a link to buy the book on Amazon.com.

The Breath of God

Jeffrey Small
Sept. 21, 2011

In 1887, a Russian journalist made an explosive discovery in a remote Himalayan monastery only to be condemned and silenced for the heresy he proposed. His discovery vanished shortly thereafter. Now, graduate student Grant Matthews journeys to the Himalayas in search of this ancient mystery. But Matthews couldn’t have anticipated the conspiracy of zealots who would go to any lengths to prevent him from bringing this secret public. Soon he is in a race to expose a truth that will change the world’s understanding of religion. A truth that his university colleagues believe is mere myth. A truth that will change his life forever—if he survives. (Jeff Small, facilitator)

Room

Emma Donoghue
Oct. 19, 2011

To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it’s where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits. Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it’s not enough…not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son’s bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work. Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, ROOM is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another. (Missi McMorries and Jerry Byrd, co-facilitators)

Strangers at the Feast

Jennifer Vanderbes
Nov. 9, 2011 (please note: this is the second Wednesday of the month)

Every one of the Olsons who gather on Thanksgiving Day, 2007, has issues. Matriarch Eleanor, adrift after years of ministering to a husband who never recovered from his Vietnam war experience, is flummoxed by her children’s choices: her unmarried college professor daughter, Ginny, has just adopted a mute Indian girl, and son Douglas is up to his neck in the real estate bubble, prompting the ire of his wife, Denise, who can barely stand the ineptitude of Ginny’s attempt at cooking Thanksgiving dinner. Then there’s Kijo, who is out for revenge after one of Douglas’s real estate deals gets his grandmother’s home condemned. When Ginny’s oven fails and the Olsen family decamps to Denise and Douglas’s McMansion, the catastrophe that ensues will change and bind the lives of everyone involved. (Geoffrey Hoare, facilitator)

Suite Française

Irène Némirovsky
Jan. 18, 2012

By the early 1940s, when Ukrainian-born Irene Nemirovsky began working on what would become Suite Francaise – the first two parts of a planned five-part novel – she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France – where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis – she’d begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic; her daughters took the manuscript with them into hiding. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Nemirovsky’s literary masterpiece. The first part, “A Storm in June,” opens in the chaos of the 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion, during which several families and individuals are thrown together under circumstances beyond their control. In the second part, “Dolce,” we enter the increasingly complex life of a German-occupied provincial village. Coexisting uneasily with the soldiers billeted among them, the villagers – from aristocrats to shopkeepers to peasants – cope as best they can. (Ethel Ware Carter, facilitator)

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

Maggie O’Farrell
Feb. 15, 2012

“Let us begin with two girls at a dance,” writes Maggie O’Farrell, and the reader is immediately pulled into a journey across continents, generations, and the hidden landscapes of the heart. The story she tells encompasses the confused present of a contemporary young woman, Iris Lockhart; the unsuspected past of Iris’s grandmother, Kitty, adrift in the forgetfulness of Alzheimer’s; and the long-concealed life of Kitty’s sister Esme, who has spent a lifetime institutionalized for refusing to accept the conventions of 1930s Edinburgh society. (Kathy Bowman, facilitator)

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

Janisse Ray
March 21, 2012

Janisse Ray grew up in a junkyard along U.S. Highway 1, hidden from Florida-bound vacationers by the hedge at the edge of the road and by hulks of old cars and stacks of blown-out tires. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood tells how a childhood spent in rural isolation and steeped in religious fundamentalism grew into a passion to save the almost vanished longleaf pine ecosystem that once covered the South. In language at once colloquial, elegiac, and informative, Ray redeems two Souths. (Clark Lemons, facilitator)

Hotel du Lac

Anita Brookner
April 18, 2012

Edith Hope (a.k.a. romance author Veronica Wilde) has been banished by her friends to a stately hotel in Switzerland. During her stay she befriends some of the other guests, each of whom has his or her own tale. Edith struggles to come to terms with her career and love–the lack, the benefits, and the meaning thereof. (Jen Waters, facilitator)

The Bright Forever

Lee Martin
May 16, 2012

On an evening like any other, nine-year-old Katie Mackey, daughter of the most affluent family in a small town on the plains of Indiana, sets out on her bicycle to return some library books. This simple act is at the heart of The Bright Forever, a suspenseful, deeply affecting novel about the choices people make that change their lives forever. Keeping fact, speculation, and contradiction playing off one another as the details unfold, author Lee Martin creates a fast-paced story that is as gripping as it is richly human. His beautiful, clear-eyed prose builds to an extremely nuanced portrayal of the complicated give and take among people struggling to maintain their humanity in the shadow of a loss. (Jerry Byrd, facilitator)