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Diary of a Country Priest
Diary of a Country Priest
Nov 6, 2025 11:20 PM

Author:Georges Bernanos,Howard Curtis

Diary of a Country Priest

A moving spiritual masterpiece that shows the true meaning of divinity in a hostile world

A young, shy, sickly priest is assigned to his first parish, a sleepy village in northern France. Though his faith is devout, he finds nothing but indifference and mockery. The children laugh at his teachings, his parishioners are consumed by boredom, rumours are spread about him and he is tormented by stomach pains. Even his attempts to clarify his thoughts in a diary fail to deliver him from worldly concerns. Yet somehow, despite his suffering, he tries to find love for his fellow humans, and even a state of grace.

Translated by Howard Curtis

Reviews

Sarah Schulman is a brilliant visionary, and this is a book of resistance and love, as urgently necessary now as it was thirty years ago

—— Olivia Laing

A scathing and darkly hilarious apocalypse-now

—— The Nation

Strong, nervy and challenging

—— The New York Times

Startlingly powerful

—— Dorothy Allison

A witty, angry and anguished novel

—— Publishers Weekly

The questions that the novel stages about action, complicity, and discomfort are evergreen, but they resonate with particular force for any American trying to figure out their relationship to Trump and Trumpism now

—— Peter C. Baker , The New Yorker

This is the first work of fiction I've read about AIDS that portrays the enormous activist response the epidemic has generated...Schulman's people are fighters...terrifically inspiring examples of the human spirit's passion for revival

—— David Leavitt

This emotional book won't make the walls of repression crumble, but it might make you understand this painful, hopeful moment better

—— The Village Voice

Redemption Falls is trauma incarnate, but its effect is both compassionate and luminous

—— TLS

Books of this quality demand to be reread to reveal more of their complexities and layers of meaning. Redemption Falls would reward this on the level of its rich textures of language alone

—— Sunday Herald

Ta-Nehisi Coates has emerged as an important public intellectual and perhaps America's most incisive thinker about race.

—— New York Times

Slavery, forgetting and memory are at the heart of Coates's ambitious, compelling first novel...

—— TLS

A rich, imaginative, vividly characterised rite-of-passage tale

—— Nicolette Jones, The Sunday Times

High-octane adventure accompanies ingenious plotting

—— The Times
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