Patrick Süskind’s 1985 novel Perfume: The story of a murderer

Patrick Süskind, Das Parfum: die Geschichte eines Mörders. Diogenes, 1985 Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The story of a murderer. Translator: John E. Woods. Vintage International, 1986. Again a long break since I last wrote, caused by the need to edit the final volume of a research project three of us had been working on since the early 1990s,1 […]

On Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948)

I suppose it’s inevitable that my search for novels of Christian experience should bring me back to Graham Greene. The Heart of the Matter is a novel of Christian experience with a difference. It is set in Freetown, capital of the then British colony of Sierra Leone, during the Second World War. Greene never refers […]

About George MacDonald’s novel Thomas Wingfold, Curate

A couple of months ago, I wrote about novels of Christian experience, and more recently I asked whether The Brothers Karamazov was an example of this genre. Thomas Wingfold, curate is a novel that epitomises what I mean by the term. Thomas Wingfold, curate, published in 1876, is the first novel in George MacDonald’s Wingfold […]

Is The brothers Karamazov a novel of Christian experience?

A few weeks ago I wrote about my search for “novels of Christian experience”, novels written by Christians who choose to convey something of Christian experience to a mainstream audience. At the time I was reading Dostoyevsky’s novel The brothers Karamazov, and  recently I finished it. Is it a novel of Christian experience? It comes from a cultural setting different from my own, but […]

Novels of Christian experience

At my English high school I came to love classical music and  throughout my high-school years I sang in the school choir. I clearly remember something that happened when I was sixteen or seventeen. I think I would have called myself an agnostic at the time. We had been practising Handel’s Messiah for a performance in Wimbledon Town Hall, and the great night arrived. We sang […]

William Young’s The Shack

When I read William Young’s novel The Shack shortly after it was published in 2007, I was so struck by its theology that I wrote a summary — not of the story but of its theology, much of which is fairly explicit in the dialogue and the narrative. Having seen the movie a few days […]

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