These stories have not been around long enough to truly qualify as “classics,” but we have little doubt that they will continue to impact people for the good in generations to come. We have selected these great works either because they depict the true, good, and beautiful in a way that captures our imaginations and cultivates our love for the true, good, and beautiful; or because they provide a powerful and clarifying analysis of the human condition. Because they capture our imaginations, good novels can be an important force in cultivating our growth as a whole person. Our lives are not transformed when we merely inform our intellects of truth. Our hearts must also be directed to love what is good, and this is accomplished when our imaginations are captured by depictions of goodness and beauty in stories, whether imaginative or true.
Please recognize that these novels are seldom overtly “Christian.” Many of them reflect and contribute to the formation of a Christian worldview, but some are selected simply because they have deeply impacted our culture and help us to understand the society we live in. We try to avoid books that include gratuitous or overly graphic depictions of evil, but any true analysis of the human condition or any realistic account of redemption must reckon with the reality of evil and sin. We also recognize that readers have varying levels of sensitivity, and urge you to exercise discernment as you read.
Title | Description | Category | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Wendell Berry | Reissued as part of Counterpoint's celebration of beloved American author Wendell Berry, the five stories in Fidelity return readers to Berry's fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, and the familiar characters who form a tight–knit community within.
"Each of these elegant stories spans the twentieth century and reveals the profound interconnectedness of… | Books ⋅ Literature ⋅ Contemporary Literature | |
 | Marilynne Robinson | Gilead takes its name from a fictional Iowa town, the setting of several novels by Marilynne Robinson. In Gilead, Robinson writes in the voice of the aging Reverend John Ames, exploring the beauty, mystery, and pain of existence through a lyrical, meditative letter Ames writes to his young son. This… | Books ⋅ Literature ⋅ Contemporary Literature | |
 | Marilynne Robinson | One of America's most acclaimed living authors, Marilynne Robinson, revisits the characters from her Pulitzer Prize–winning Gilead, in this "impossibly rich and beautiful new novel" (San Francisco Chronicle)
Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father, Reverend Robert Boughton. Soon her brother, Jack—the prodigal son of… | Books ⋅ Literature ⋅ Contemporary Literature |