Looking for great summer reading? Here is The Catholic Weekly’s list of 25 great reads published in the first 25 years of the century. All lists are controversial, and many of the below are not explicitly Christian but we hope that our selections will entertain and sometimes edify mature readers. We aimed at diversity of length and genres. With a couple of exceptions, authors are represented by only one book.
Thanks to everyone who made suggestions – Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP, Chris Meney, Marilyn Rodrigues, Lienntje Cornelissen, Therese Schaefer, Susanna Kent, Craig Smith, Michael Kirke, Brian Madden, Sr Anastasia Reeves OP, and Terri Acquilina.
Anthony Doer, All the Light we Cannot See (2014). This touching novel about World War II won a Pulitzer Prize. The lives of blind French girl and a young German soldier cross during the horrific battle over the French coastal town of Saint-Malo.
Samantha Harvey, Orbital (2023). This Booker Prize winning novel relates the musings of six fictional astronauts as they orbit the globe in their space station over 24 hours. An eloquent meditation on God, climate change, and the meaning of life.
Eleanor Bourg Nicholson, A Bloody Habit (2018). A witty, imaginative theological thriller about vampire-hunting in London in 1900.
Alexander McCall Smith, Tea Time for the Traditionally Built (2009). A charming story about Botswana sleuth Precious Ramotswe. The tenth novel in the author’s The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series.
Katy Carl, As Earth without Water (2021). A lyrical story about forgiveness and the mystery of vocation.
Eugenio Corti, The Red Horse (2002). Italy’s tragic role in World War II is almost unknown in Australia. This is an epic novel about four friends in the war and the civil war which followed. (We’ve broken our own rules; it was published in Italian in 1983, but in English only in 2002.)
Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe (2018). This debut Australian novel has become a Netflix series. It’s rough and hard-hitting in its descriptions of low-life Brisbane in the early 80s but ultimately positive.
Eugene Vodolazkin, Laurus (2012). A prize-winning Russian novel about a mediaeval monk. A touching meditation on reconciliation, forgiveness, and God.
Michael Flynn, Eifelheim (2006). An historian investigates the strange disappearance of a mediaeval German village after the Black Death. It turns out that in 1348 an alien spaceship crash-landed there – leading to meditations on whether aliens can become Christians and why do bad things happen to good people and good aliens.
Michael Curtis Ford, Gods and Legions (2002). A stirring historical epic about the rise and fall of Julian the Apostate – Roman emperor, scholar, and foe of Christianity.
Jon Fosse, A Shining (2023). This Norwegian author won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2023. Surprisingly, he is a devout Catholic convert. His best-known novel, Septology, has 800 pages and one full stop. Mercifully, the sentences in this novella are only a page or so long. It’s a moving meditation on guardian angels and the presence of God.
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004). This is a masterpiece woven from threads of American history, a deep understanding of human nature, an exceptional grasp of the fatherhood of God, and musical prose. An elderly Congregational minister is dying in the small town of Gilead, Iowa, in the 1950s and writes his life story for his seven-year-old son.
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005). Like all of this Nobel Prize winner’s work, this sci-fi novel is a tender and humane reflection on connection and loneliness. It relates the lives of clones in an English boarding school whose fate is to be harvested for their organs.
Dean Koontz, Innocence (2013). Koontz, a Catholic convert, is one the world’s best-selling novelists. His books deal with a strange blend of horror, fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and satire. This story is about a boy whose face provokes extreme violence in anyone who sees it.
Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem (2008). This is the best-ever Chinese sci fi novel. An alien civilisation on a dying planet which revolves around three suns is trying to invade Earth. But efforts to confront the enemy are almost thwarted by fifth-columnists.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006). He has a reputation for novels full of sadistic violence, but McCarthy is a serious writer who grapples with the problem of evil. The Road is a post-apocalyptic story about a father’s love for his son. The prose is magnificent.
Michael D. O’Brien, The Lighthouse (2020). Popular Canadian Catholic novelist, iconographer, and artist Michael D O’Brien is one of the greatest spiritual storytellers of modern times. In this short novel an unbelieving lighthouse keeper faces storms both natural and supernatural.
Michael D. O’Brien, Elijah in Jerusalem (2015). Father Elijah, a Carmelite monk, is called to confront a powerful politician who could be the Antichrist foretold in the Bible.
Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera, The Awakening of Miss Prim (2013). This debut novel was a surprise international best-seller. A sophisticated young woman becomes a librarian in an idyllic country town in France where she discovers love, friendship, and the joys of argument.
Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016). This is a whimsical, imaginative story with a surprise ending about a genteel Russian poet. After the Bolshevik Revolution he is confined to a garret in Moscow’s only international hotel. Stepping outside is a death sentence. How does he make the time pass?
Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary (2021). One critic hailed this sci fi novel as “An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.”
Irène Némirovsky, Suite française (2004). Again, we’re cheating. This harrowing but very moving novel about the chaotic and catastrophic fall of France in 1940 was written at the time by a young Jewish woman. Before she was sent to Auschwitz, she hid the manuscript, which was recovered only in 1998.
Susanna Clarke, Piranesi (2020). This prize-winning novel was praised to the skies as an imaginative masterpiece during COVID, when it was published. It is the journal of a scientist, Piranesi, who lives in the House, a world composed of infinite halls and statue-lined vestibules.
Archbishop Anthony Fisher’s picks
Robbie Arnott, Limberlost (2022). In wartime 1940s young Ned spends his holidays in northwest Tasmania trapping and shooting rabbits to save money for a boat. His choices that summer shape the rest of his life. A beautiful, elegiac novel with Tasmania’s shimmering landscape as a background.
Marilynne Robinson, Home (2008). This Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Presbyterian theologian has written several brilliant novels about two interconnected families in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa. They are beautiful, deeply moving stories about God’s love for broken and imperfect people.
