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The Book Against God

By James Wood

(1)

| Paperback | 9780099453574

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Book Description

A Passionate, Profoundly Funny First Novel from “the Best Literary Critic of His Generation” (Adam Begley, Financial Times)

Thomas Bunting, the charming, chaotic, and deeply untruthful narrator of James Wood’s wonderful first novel, is in despair. His marriage Continue

A Passionate, Profoundly Funny First Novel from “the Best Literary Critic of His Generation” (Adam Begley, Financial Times)

Thomas Bunting, the charming, chaotic, and deeply untruthful narrator of James Wood’s wonderful first novel, is in despair. His marriage is disintegrating and his academic career is in ruins: instead of completing his philosophy Ph.D. (still unfinished after seven years), he is secretly writing what he hopes will be his masterwork, a vast atheistic project he has privately entitled “The Book Against God.”

But when his father suddenly falls ill, Thomas returns to the tiny village in the north of England where he grew up and where his father still works as a parish priest. There, Thomas hopes, he may finally be able to communicate honestly with his father, a brilliant and formidable Christian example, and sort out his own wayward life. But Thomas is a chronic liar as well as an atheist, and he finds, instead, that once at home he soon reverts to the evasive patterns of his childhood years—with disastrous results.

The story of a husband and wife, a father and son, faith and disbelief, and a hero who couldn’t tell the truth if his life depended on it, The Book Against God is at once hilarious and poignant; it introduces an original comic voice—edgy, elegiac, lyrical, and indignant—and, in the irrepressible Thomas Bunting, one of the strangest philosophers in contemporary fiction.

Critics

  • You won't laugh, you won't cry

    The Book Against God by James Wood Cape £12.99, pp248 There's a sense in which all those who publish novels offer themselves naked to the reading public. The frenzy of the blurb, the casual radiance of the author photo, offer no real defence. But the ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

  • Believe it or not

    The Book Against God by James Wood 256pp, Cape, £12.99 If religion is true, one must believe, writes James Wood in the introduction to The Broken Estate (1999), a collection of his literary criticism. "And if one chooses not to believe, one's choice ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

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Book Details

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  • English Books
  • Paperback 256 Pages
  • ISBN-10: 0099453576
  • ISBN-13: 9780099453574
  • Publisher: Vintage Uk
  • Pub date: Mar 31, 2004
  • Also available as: Hardcover
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9780099453574 Paperback $11.46 $9.80 The Book Depository
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