Catholic Fiction: the Canon
Book
The Power and the Glory
by Graham Greene
A tormented, alcoholic priest is pursued by an idealistic lieutenant during an anti-clerical persecution in Mexico.
Book
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce
James Joyce's coming-of-age story, a tour de force of style and technique The first, shortest, and most approachable of James Joyce’s novels, A Portrait of …
Book
The Diary of a Country Priest
by Georges Bernanos
In this classic Catholic novel, Bernanos movingly recounts the life of a young French country priest who grows to understand his provincial parish while learning …
Book
A Canticle for Leibowitz
by Walter M. Miller
Winner of the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Novel and widely considered one of the most accomplished, powerful, and enduring classics of modern speculative fiction, …
Book
Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
Captain Charles Ryder, stationed at Brideshead, recalls his boyhood associations with the odd but charming members of an English noble family
Book
The Violent Bear It Away
by Flannery O'Connor
"A back country orphan struggles to defy his uncle's prophesy that he will become a baptist prophet"--NoveList.
Book
Death Comes for the Archbishop
by Willa Cather
In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour becomes Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico, and over the next forty years he faces the lawlessness and loneliness of …
Book
Kristin Lavransdatter
by Sigrid Undset
“[Sigrid Undset] should be the next Elena Ferrante.” —Slate The turbulent historical masterpiece of Norway’s literary master A Penguin Classic In her great historical epic …
Book
Mariette in Ecstasy
by Ron Hansen
The highly acclaimed and provocatively rendered story of a young postulant's claim to divine possession and religious ecstasy.
Book
The Man Who Was Thursday
by G. K. Chesterton
G. K. Chesterton's surreal masterpiece is a psychological thriller that centers on seven anarchists in turn-of-the-century London who call themselves by the names of the …
Book
Memento Mori
by Muriel Spark
Unforgettably astounding and a joy to read, Memento Mori is considered by many to be the greatest novel by the wizardly Dame Muriel Spark.
Book
The Children of Men
by P. D. James
In 2021, with the human race becoming extinct because of the infertility of all males, Oxford historian Theodore Faron is drawn into the schemes of …
Book
Strangers and Sojourners
by Michael D. O'Brien
In the aftermath of World War I, an Englishwoman emigrates to British Columbia where she falls in love with an Irish trapper who is escaping …
Book
In this House of Brede
by Rumer Godden
"A novel of sensitive dedication." --"The Atlantic Monthly" "Rumer Godden deals precisely with the theme of the religious life . . . as representing 'the …
Book
The Lord of the Rings
by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
Presents the epic depicting the Great War of the Ring, a struggle between good and evil in Middle-earth, following the odyssey of Frodo the hobbit …
Book
Morte D'Urban
by J.F. Powers
Winner of The 1963 National Book Award for Fiction. The hero of J.F. Powers's comic masterpiece is Father Urban, a man of the cloth who …
Book
All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The first volume in the Border Trilogy, from the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer …
Book
Nobody's Fool
by Richard Russo
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Empire Falls, this slyly funny, moving novel about a blue-collar town in upstate New York—and about Sully, one of …
Book
The Betrothed
by Alessandro Manzoni
“The great plague novel.” —The New Yorker Set in Lombardy during the Spanish occupation of the late 1620s, The Betrothed tells the story of two …
Book
Quo Vadis
by Henryk Sienkiewicz
Translated by Stanley F Conrad. Set around the dawn of Christianity with amazing historical accuracy Quo Vadis? won Sienkiewicz the Nobel Prize. Written nearly a …
