IN OUR 2024 Books for Christmas, speakers in next year’s Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature are making their choice from the past year. The literary festival will return to the city of Winchester, and, for 2025, the entire programme takes place in the cathedral precincts. To mark the 250th birthday of Jane Austen, the festival takes as its theme “A Truth Universally Acknowledged”. It runs from Friday 28 February to Sunday 2 March. For more details and to book tickets, visit faithandliterature.hymnsam.co.uk. The early-bird ticket offer ends on 2 January
Helen King
Notes from a Eucharistic Life by Manon Ceridwen James (Cinnamon Press, £9.99 (£8.99) 978-1-78864-984-1)
MANON CERIDWEN JAMES’s poems about her bodily and spiritual identity as priest and woman are full of moments that I recognised. There are insights into eucharistic and funeral ministry, and reminders of all the places where, as a woman, one can feel out of place and not entirely welcome, and where one is “too directive or too passive”. Her insights into parish life and the resistance to change are honest and very funny, as she explores familiar Bible stories, changing duvet covers, and Jesus with a Hoover. “Consecration in the time of Covid” is itself worth the price of the book.
Dr Helen King is Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at the Open University, and is a historian of medicine and the body. Her latest book is Immaculate Forms: Uncovering the History of Women’s Bodies (Wellcome Collection, 2024).
Carys Davies
North Woods by Daniel Mason (John Murray, £9.99 (£8.99) 978-1-3998-0930-6)
CONSTRUCTED around a series of stories about all the people who lived in one house in the forests of Massachusetts over a period of four centuries, Daniel Mason’s ambitious and exquisitely realised novel was my favourite of the year. I love stories that make us feel what it is for us, as humans, to move through time, and Mason’s brilliant, beautiful novel does that magnificently. Even as I was sad to come to the end of each episode, I found myself quickly caught up in the next. Each section is wonderful in its own way — by turns painful, funny, moving, and profound. An immensely entertaining, meaty, and endlessly surprising read.
Carys Davies is a prizewinning novelist. Her latest novel is Clear (Granta Books, 2024).
Stephen Cottrell
The Wrong Person to Ask by Marjorie Lotfi (Bloodaxe Books, £12 (£10.80); 978-1-78037-639-4)
FOR me, the poets usually have it over the theologians. They are better at words made flesh. Therefore, my stand-out book of the year is Marjorie Lotfi’s award-winning debut collection of poems, The Wrong Person to Ask. I happened to read just one of her poems in a newspaper on a train going down to London (a journey I make too often). By the end of the day, I’d bought the book. By the following day, I’d consumed it. Or, should I say, it had ravished me. Shaped by her migrations from Iran to America to Scotland, her poems are meditations on the themes of exile, refuge, memory, place, and the pressing grip of what has gone. They are beautiful.
The Most Revd Stephen Cottrell is the Archbishop of York. His latest book is Praying by Heart: The Lord’s Prayer for everyone (Hodder & Stoughton, 2024).
Mark Oakley
Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst (Picador, £22 (£19.80); 978-1-4472-0823-5)
IN THE middle of this seventh novel by the Booker Prizewinner Alan Hollinghurst, we come across Cicero’s observation that “insensibly, without feeling, life is ageing.” Life drifts, without ultimate direction, and we are carried along, blind to time, left with the enigma of a recollected past. This is a languorous and expansive odyssey of a novel that bears witness to this: a novel whose many pleasures require our patience, but whose moments of beauty are as poignant as anything Hollinghurst has ever written.
The Very Revd Dr Mark Oakley is the Dean of Southwark.
Diarmaid MacCulloch
Immaculate Forms: A history of women’s bodies by Helen King (Wellcome Collection, £25 (£20); 978-1-78816-387-3)
WHILE I was writing a rather large book on the history of sex, I asked Professor Helen King to read a draft of the text. She perused it and said some complimentary things, but commented crisply: “You’ve said nothing about the clitoris.” Startled, I remedied the defect, but also understood better why this was necessary when I read her enthralling Immaculate Forms. No shortage of historical commentary on the clitoris here — and, indeed, plenty on other aspects of female anatomy which have puzzled, fascinated, and intimidated the male half of the species over several millennia. Read it and be enlightened as well as entertained.
The Revd Dr Diarmaid MacCulloch is Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church, in the University of Oxford, and Fellow of St Cross and of Campion Hall, Oxford. His latest book is Lower than the Angels: A history of sex and Christianity (Allen Lane, 2024).
Malcolm Guite
The Diary of an Old Soul by George MacDonald, annotated with introduction and notes by Timothy Larsen (IVP Academic, £25.99 (£23.39); 978-1-5140-0768-6)
PUBLISHED for the MacDonald bicentenary, this new edition of the sequence of seven-line reflective poems that MacDonald wrote each day over a year invites you into the prayer life of one of the great teachers of the faith. You can follow him on the journey daily or just dip in; to look up the poem for the day, you take up the book. You are always challenged, inspired, and nourished.
For those who don’t yet know the Diary, this edition, with its helpful annotations, is the perfect introduction. For those who do, be prepared to look at an old friend with new eyes and new appreciation.
The Revd Dr Malcolm Guite is a poet and singer-songwriter.
Andrew Ziminski
Saints: A new legendary of heroes, humans and magic by Amy Jeffs (Riverrun £30 (£27); 978-1-5294-1661-9)
SAINTS, by Amy Jeffs, is a fine successor to her 2021 hit, Storyland, and its follow-up, Wild. In Saints, Dr Jeffs melds her distinctive style of artwork with retellings of the mythology of both well-known and obscure medieval saints. Her tales, which focus on each of the saints’ days through the passing year, are drawn from their hagiographies and given extra colour through their appearances in manuscripts, church wall-paintings, and pilgrim badges. Saints succeeds not only in entertaining the reader, but also in reviving the legends of many lesser-known saints who largely disappeared from view after the Reformations.
Andrew Ziminski is a stonemason and church conservator. His latest book, Church Going: A stonemason’s guide to the churches of the British Isles (Profile, 2024), is reviewed here.
Edward Stourton
James by Percival Everett (Pan Macmillan, £20 (£18); 978-1-0350-3123-8)
THERE are not many books that combine the readability of an airport thriller with the enduring power of high art, but Percival Everett’s James clears that bar effortlessly. The conceit of telling The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the slave Jim proves very funny: satire of the most enjoyable kind. But, as the story unfolds, the satire turns savage, and, although the read remains compelling, it is sometimes almost unbearably painful. It is said that Huckleberry Finn is “one of the central documents of American culture”. James aims to change that culture, and it deserves to succeed.
Edward Stourton is a broadcaster and regularly presents Radio 4 programmes such as Sunday, The World at One, and The World This Weekend.
Chine McDonald
The Anxious Generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness by Jonathan Haidt (Allen Lane £25 (£22.50); 978-0-241-64766-0)
I WOULD not say I enjoyed reading this book. In fact, most of the book, by the US social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, is like reading a horror story. In this instance, the horror is the devastating effects of smartphones, technology, and social media on children since 2010. Our young people are facing a crisis of meaninglessness and a mental-health epidemic, and are increasingly being isolated from community. Haidt lays out a careful and compelling case for why action should be taken. What I loved about the book was that the author did not leave me with a sense of dread, but outlined the practical actions that could be taken to protect future generations.
Chine McDonald is a writer, broadcaster, and director of the religion-and-society think tank Theos.
Rachel Mann
The Perils of Lady Catherine de Bourgh by Claudia Gray (Vintage, £14.99 (£13.49); 978-0-593-68658-4)
THERE are books we read because we ought, and books we read for pure pleasure. Claudia Gray’s third book in her Mr Darcy and Miss Tilney Mysteries falls firmly into the latter category. The conceit of the series is simple and charming: what would happen if Jane Austen’s best characters met up and murder happened? Gray handles the conceit brilliantly, and, in Jonathan Darcy and Juliet Tilney, creates a quite charming detective duo. Gray’s love for both Austen and detective fiction is winsome. I can’t wait for the next instalment.
The Ven. Dr Rachel Mann is the Archdeacon of Bolton and Salford, and a Visiting Fellow of Manchester Met University.
Jayne Manfredi
Undercurrent: A Cornish memoir of poverty, nature and resilience by Natasha Carthew (Hodder & Stoughton, £9.99 (£8.99); 978-1-3997-0651-3)
“HOPE is the difference between doing something and giving up.” So writes Natasha Carthew, in this story of being raised amid poverty in remote Cornwall. She jarringly describes the extremes of difference to be found in this corner of Britain, a place sought after by the wealthy for second homes, but where the working-class Cornish-born people can no longer afford to remain. Carthew’s grit and strength inspired me deeply, as did her impressive knowledge of the Cornish coast. A place — and a story — of savage beauty, vividly described.
The Revd Jayne Manfredi is an Anglican deacon, writer, and teacher, and a presenter of Thought for the Day on Radio 4. Her latest book is Waking the Women: Faith, menopause, and the meaning of midlife (Canterbury Press, 2024).
Jem Bloomfield
Twilight of the Godlings: The shadowy beginnings of Britain’s supernatural beings by Francis Young (Cambridge University Press, £30 (£27); 978-1-009-33036-7)
I WAS looking forward to this one, having read Francis Young’s work on supernatural beliefs before. The book explores the origins and nature of the godlings of Britain: “the gods of nature, the fauns and satyrs, the divinities of fate and chance”. Were they the deified spirits of the dead, or dim memories of a pagan pantheon, or something else entirely? It’s a vivid and extremely readable exploration of a complex and contested topic. Young has a knack for picking out details that are both mysterious and telling, and then examining them with intellectual rigour.
Dr Jem Bloomfield is an Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Nottingham and a Reader in the Church of England. His latest book is Gold on the Horizon: A literary journey through “Prince Caspian” and “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” (DLT, 2024).