The Kingdom
Emmanuel Carrère, translated by John Lambert

 “I’m writing this book to avoid thinking that, now that I no longer believe, I know better than those who do.” Emmanuel Carrère, hailed as France’s greatest writer of non-fiction, homes in on St Paul, St Luke and the origins of Christianity in this exhilarating work that was a prize-winning literary sensation in France and has sold over 200,000 copies.

The Kingdom is quite a departure from his best-seller The Adversary, an extraordinarily compelling account of Jean-Claude Romand, an arch-deceiver who murdered his family; and Other Lives But Mine, a story that encompasses the tsunami of 2004 and an investigation into loss, love and marriage, including his own.

In all his non-fiction (he also writes novels and screenplays), Carrère remains preoccupied with good and evil, suffering, selfishness, as well as the process of writing. The Kingdom, much longer – and more difficult – than his previous books, is just as idiosyncratic and personal, mixing profound self-revelation with a kind of non-fiction novelisation of the Early Church.