skopia
On a Georgia back road a grandmother who talked her family into a detour meets an escaped killer. O'Connor's stories stay funny until the violence arrives, which is how grace arrives too.
Charles Ryder, an officer billeted at a requisitioned country house, remembers the Catholic family who owned it: the ruined son he loved at Oxford, the sister he wanted later, and grace closing in.
Two French priests give their lives to a diocese in territorial New Mexico. Cather dissolves plot into landscape and legend, and their friendship carries decades of desert riding without a raised voice.
Pinkie Brown runs a Brighton razor gang at seventeen, kills without flinching, and believes in hell the way other people believe in weather. Greene makes damnation the engine of a seaside thriller.
Jealousy narrated from the inside by a man who hates the God he does not believe in. A wartime bomb falls on the lovers, and the woman makes a promise she keeps.
In 1714 a rope bridge in Peru snaps and five travelers fall to their deaths. A Franciscan who witnessed it spends six years reconstructing their lives to prove God chose them.
At twenty-eight Wedgwood narrated Europe's most ruinous pre-modern war whole, thirty years of armies eating Germany alive, and her verdict of meaningless conflict still has to be argued with.
A dumpy Catholic priest with an umbrella solves crimes by imagining himself into the criminal until he could have done it. Chesterton answered Sherlock Holmes with conscience rather than forensics.