The Kingdom
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- €4.99
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- €4.99
Publisher Description
'The Kingdom, already a huge bestseller in France, is thrilling, magnificent and strange' Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times
'An utterly brilliant book' Catherine Nixey, The Times
The sensational international bestseller from one of France's most fêted writers - an epic novel telling the story of Christianity as it has never been told before, and one man's crisis of faith.
Corinth, ancient Greece, two thousand years ago. An itinerant preacher, poor, wracked by illness, tells the story of a prophet who was crucified in Judea, who came back from the dead, and whose return is a sign of something enormous. Like a contagion, the story will spread over the city, the country and, eventually, the world. Emmanuel Carrère's astonishing historical epic tells the story of the mysterious beginnings of Christianity, bringing to life a distant, primeval past of strange sects, apocalyptic beliefs and political turmoil. In doing so Carrère, once himself a fervent believer, questions his own faith, asks why we believe in resurrection, and what it means. The Kingdom is his masterpiece.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The latest from Carr re (Limonov) is a tale of modern and ancient Christianity, filtered through a text that's equal parts memoir, academic essay, and fictional exploration. Starting first with the author's brief, intense relationship with religion in the early 1990s, the book follows Carr re's path as he eventually finds fault with his faith. From here, he turns back the clock to parse out the lives of early Christian evangelists, particularly Paul and Luke, starting in 50 CE. Combining scholarship, biblical reference, and imagination, Carr re brings the exploits of these men, working to spread the story of Jesus to the masses while being persecuted and challenged by detractors, to life. The author approaches every moment with the mind of a skeptical storyteller, plugging in personal theories about the identities of the authors behind biblical letters and gospels and questioning the validity of the many miracles Jesus is said to have performed. Jumping back and forth through time at one point, talk of the Virgin Mary leads to a tangent on Internet porn results in a frequently fascinating book written by a curious, sharp mind.
