Out of the Whirlwind: Innocent Pain as a Challenge to God
ADRIAN ROBERTS
(SACRISTY PRESS, 110 PP, £9.99)
Tablet bookshop price £9 • Tel 020 7799 4064

The Book of Job is one of the most puzzling chapters of the Old Testament, and this book has helped me understand it for the first time.

Adrian Roberts’ son, Hal, suffers from ­cerebral palsy. He cannot walk or talk and communicates through vocal noises and facial expressions. He is doubly incontinent and has regular seizures, some of them severe. The strain of caring for him has broken his parents’ marriage. As the father – a practising Christian – sits beside his son’s bed in a hospital children’s ward at a time of crisis, he asks himself the age-old question: how can a merciful and loving God allow this to happen? Which takes him and us to the Book of Job.