"Always trust a stranger," said David s mother when he returned from Rome. "It s the people you know who let you down." Half a life later, David is Father Anderton, a Catholic priest with a small parish in Scotland. He befriends Mark and Lisa, rebellious local teenagers who live in a world he barely understands. Their company stirs memories of earlier happiness his days at a Catholic school in Yorkshire, the student revolt in 1960s Oxford, and a choice he once made in the orange groves of Rome. But their friendship also ignites the suspicions and smoldering hatred of a town that resents strangers, and brings Father David to a reckoning with the gathered tensions of past and present. In this masterfully written novel, Andrew O Hagan explores the emotional and moral contradictions of religious life in a faithless age. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

This burnished gem of a novel has drama, emotional resonance and intellectual power enough to recall one's favorite 19th century writers. At its center is David Anderton, a Scottish-born, Oxford-educated Catholic priest who, after years in England, assumes a parish in working-class Scotland to be closer to his mother, a writer and free spirit. Now in his 50s, David recalls his own passions vividly, but he has traded his 1960s university ideals to favor the Iraq war, and his realizations of romantic love for a life of the cloth. From early on, there's a glaring gap between David's first-person recollections and the elitist, alienating affectations he assumes with others. His Dalgarnock parishioners are suspicious of his education; his only companions are his sardonic but morally stringent housekeeper, Mrs. Poole, and a pair of thuggish teenagers, Mark and Lisa, who remind him of his own youthful rebellions. As Mark and Lisa draw David into their chaotic lives, the novel builds to an inevitable clash between the spiritual and the secular, the adult and adolescent, the utopian 1960s and the neoconservative 2000s. Throughout, O'Hagan (The Missing) enchants with his effortless prose, vivid characters and David's uncanny asides, making O'Hagan's fourth novel a heartrending tour de force. (June) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, O'Hagan's third novel features Father David Anderton, a proud descendant of Lancashire's Catholic martyrs, who undergoes his own ordeal when he transfers to the deprived parish of Dalgarnock. Though born in Edinburgh, he is perceived as an Englishman among Scots, an Oxford-educated wine sipper amid the ale-drinking unemployed, and a Catholic priest in an angrily Protestant town: "Northern Ireland was just across the water, and what Dalgarnock had was a briny dilution of Ireland's famous troubles, without the interest in votes, assemblies or breakable guns." Aware of all this yet politically na?ve, Father David alienates locals with his insistence on high culture and tentative support for the Iraq war. When he falls into an uneasy friendship with two teenage hoodlums-whose bracing portrayal make them recognizable to any teacher-the plot takes a predictable turn toward priests behaving badly and the ensuing small-town witch trial. Though that story has been told before, O'Hagan keeps both accused and accusers human and even noble. The most minor characters are drawn with truth and complexity, and O'Hagan's prose is stylistically dazzling, as crafted and lovely as the best poetry. Recommended for most collections.-Leora Bersohn, doctoral student, Columbia Univ., New York Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Prologue January 1976	p. 1
1 Sundial	p. 4
2 The Mouth of the River	p. 26
3 Mr Perhaps	p. 53
4 Ailsa Craig	p. 78
5 Schoolboy on an Elephant	p. 102
6 The Nights	p. 122
7 The Economy of Grace	p. 146
8 Balliol	p. 175
9 The People	p. 212
10 The Echo of Something Real	p. 235
11 Kilmarnock	p. 258
12 The Single Life	p. 285

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