Must-Read
Best Books About Faith, Doubt, and Religion
Contemporary American literary fiction has been more interested in faith than the literary-press headlines suggest. Pentecostal childhoods, Catholic-school memory, prophetic abolitionism, Tibetan-Buddhist liminal states between death and rebirth. These six are the books our editors recommend when readers want fiction and memoir that takes faith seriously as a literary subject.
6 books on this list.
Transcendent Kingdomby Yaa Gyasi
5.0“Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi 2020 review. A Stanford neuroscience graduate student runs reward-circuit experiments on mice while her Ghanaian-born mother lives in her apartment. Gyasi's second novel after Homegoing.”
Lincoln in the Bardoby George Saunders
5.0“Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders 2017 review. Abraham Lincoln's eleven-year-old son Willie dies and Lincoln returns to the Georgetown cemetery. The Bardo is populated by the cemetery's reluctant dead. Man Booker Prize 2017.”
The Good Lord Birdby James McBride
5.0“The Good Lord Bird by James McBride 2013 review. A twelve-year-old enslaved boy falls in with John Brown in 1856 Kansas and is dressed as a girl named Onion through Harpers Ferry. National Book Award 2013.”
Belovedby Toni Morrison
5.0“Beloved by Toni Morrison 1987 review. Sethe, a former slave living in Reconstruction-era Ohio, is haunted by the daughter she killed to save from slavery. Pulitzer Prize 1988 and one of the canonical American novels of the late twentieth century.”
Pachinkoby Min Jin Lee
5.0“Pachinko by Min Jin Lee 2017 review. Four generations of a Korean family in twentieth-century Japan, beginning with Sunja's pregnancy by a married Korean gangster in 1933 Busan. The Apple TV+ adaptation source and one of the canonical contemporary Korean-American literary novels.”
Becomingby Michelle Obama
5.0“Becoming by Michelle Obama 2018 review. Michelle Obama's memoir, from her South Side Chicago childhood through the Obama White House. The political memoir that sold seventeen million copies, and the one that genuinely earns its bestseller status.”