Some Non-Catholic authors - good books with Christian values, its hard to limit to Catholics
- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
- A story of joy and childlike sense of wonder, even amid sadness and cruelty. Becoming immersed in Piranesi’s mysterious world, you find yourself navigating through its endless halls and passages as if you've been there. Susanna Clarke, a Methodist-Anglican-AngloCatholic, says that Piranesi’s connection to his house, to his surroundings, and to the world was influenced by Owen Barfield, who is one of the Inklings, so you will find nods to C.S. Lewis's Narnia and Tolkien that help deepen the spell of her storytelling and bring an eerily familiar quality to her portrait of Piranesi’s world.
- Peace Like a River by Leif Enger, a young American Evangelical Christian
- Although not Catholic, faith permeates this novel, but it's not sweet piety of the shallower sort, but a truly Christian novel with both humor and plot. It includes a dramatic story (about murder and repentance), a portrait of Christian fatherhood (and manhood), the struggle with personal sin, injustice, and humiliation.
- C. J. Sansom
- Although I don't think he's Catholic, his historical "crime novels" in the Matthew Shardlake series depict different aspects of the English Reformation (under King Henry VIII) and seem to accurately portray the religious tumult of the time. A "closed setting" mystery set in a monastery with Dissolution, a "quest" with Dark Fire, a "political thriller" with Sovereign, and now a serial killer novel with Revelation.
- Marilynne Robinson, an American Calvinist, includes Christian ideas about sin, salvation, grace and suffering in her novels, and introduces theology even to readers who do not believe in God.
- The Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead (2004), Home (2008), and Lila (2014) form a sort of trilogy, being set in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa. Readers will be led to ask questions about what life is and why it happens.
- Some novels about fictional Cardinals and Popes (think Shoes of the Fisherman)
- The Cardinal by Henry Morton Robinson
- Cardinal Galsworthy by Edward R. F. Sheehan
- The Red Hat by Ralph M. McInerny
- The Death of a Pope by Piers Paul Read (May 2009)
- The Gospel According to Judas Iscariot
- Joseph Luguya has written a very different novel, somewhat on the lines of C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters
- The Red Horse by Eugenio Corti
- A popular Italian novel about World War II and its aftershocks. While a great historical novel with its epic scope, it also contains the underlying spiritual dimensions of faith and hope in a world of cruel hatred.
- Theresa de Kerpely and her husband immigrated to the United States in 1948. A year later she converted to the Catholic faith, and the same year started writing fiction based on some of her exploits during World War II in Budapest.
- Her first novels were published under the pseudonyme Theresa Kay: A Crown for Ashes and The Burning Jewel. These historical novels reflect her own wartime experiences of hardships, bombing raids, food shortages, etc., but also the fact that near the end of the war she and her husband provided shelter for a Jewish composer disguised as a Catholic priest.
- Perhaps on its way to becoming a classic of Catholic fiction: A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) by John Kennedy Toole
- This comic masterpiece won the Pulitzer Prize, has an introduction by Walker Percy, and is set in a strong and unique Catholic milieu.
- Joris-Karl Huysmans - a French author who turned away from the Roman Catholic Church during childhood, but his disillusionment with the drab secularism at the turn of the century and fascination with the sacramental ethos of Catholicism led him to return.
- The character Durtal is a thinly disguised self-portrait. The later Durtal novels, En route (1895), La cathédrale (1898) and L'oblat (1903), explore Durtal/Huysmans' conversion to Roman Catholicism. En route depicts Durtal's spiritual struggle during his stay at a Trappist monastery. In La cathédrale, the protagonist is at Chartres, intensely studying the cathedral and its symbolism. In L'Oblat, Durtal becomes a Benedictine oblate. He finally learns to accept the world's suffering.
Classic Novels
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Discovering even More Classics
- Hilaire Belloc, described by Fr. James Schall, S.J. as 'simply the best essayist in our language' has a 1911 novel The Four Men: A Farrago describing a secular pilgrimage through Sussex by 4 men in a half-real, half-fictional allegory of life; a kind of sequel to his travelogue memoir The Path to Rome - also a delightful story of his own religious pilgrimage on foot.
- Other established American Catholic fiction writers besides O'Connor, Percy, Powers and Green include Katherine Anne Porter, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Horgan, Jack Kerouac, Pietro di Donato, Hisaye Yamamoto, Edwin O'Connor, and Caroline Gordon (Carolyn Gordon Tate).
- Other Catholic science-fiction and detective writers include Anthony Boucher, Donald Westlake, and August Derleth.
- And for good measure, American Catholic poets include Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Robert Fitzgerald, Kenneth Rexroth, John Berryman, Isabella Gardner, Phyllis McGinley, Claude McKay, Dunstan Thompson, John Frederick Nims, Brother Antoninus (William Everson), Thomas Merton, Josephine Jacobsen, Daniel Berrigan S.J., and Joyce Kilmer; even Catholic haiku poets Raymond Roseliep and Nick Virgilio.
- But I shouldn't focus only on America, there are British writers besides Greene, Waugh, and Tolkien: Edith Sitwell, Ronald Knox, Hilaire Belloc, David Jones, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Jennings, and Anthony Burgess; and French poets Paul Claudel and Pierre Reverdy.
- And some more recent Catholic authors like Ron Hansen, Alice McDermott, Mary Karr, Tobias Wolff, Richard Rodriguez, Kathleen Norris, and Dana Gioia.
Some favorite "Catholic" novels were written by non-Catholics: Albert Camus' The Plague, Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock, and A.G. Mojtabai's Thirst.
A shout out to Paul Horgan, a 20th century Catholic historian who won two Pulitzer's for his histories, the second in 1976 for Lamy of Santa Fe, a magisterial biography of the French prelate and pioneer who was Willa Cather's model in Death Comes for the Archbishop. But he also published fifteen novels and seven books of short stories. I'll mention two: Things As They Are, a series of short stories depicting a wrecked and redeemed world through the eyes of a young Catholic boy who is himself both flawed and heroic (part of a trilogy); and A Distant Trumpet, a historical novel civil war epic that contrasts fallen human nature with heroic virtue.
The Coat Without Seam by Maurice Baring A deeply Catholic novel about a character who spends his life desperately (and futilely) trying to run away from God and everyone else in his life. Baring was a talented writer who died in 1945 and was a friend to the great Catholic writers Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton.
- Myles Connolly, who was editor of the Knights of Columbus magazine Columbia for four years and part of founding the 1928 Catholic Book Club, wrote several novels, but his first, Mr. Blue was his only popular success. Others include Dan England and the Noonday Devil, The Bump on Brannigan's Head and Three Who Ventured. Also The Reason for Ann & Other Stories which contains 6 novelettes. His parable novels both make people laugh while revealing the truth. A humble but supremely talented author who wrote a number of screenplays that became films.
- BTW, the 1928 Catholic Book Club announced The Way It Was with Them by Peadar O’Donnell as it's first pick, chosen for the outstanding Catholic novel of the month, a story of struggle and livelihood set on an island off the coast of Ireland, chosen for its critical praise and being "Catholic in its attitude and moral in its recital, no less than skillful in its technique and graceful in its style." Republished in 1988 under the title Islanders by Peadar O’Donnell
- See all The Catholic Book Club selections from 1928 through 2003!
Novels Available Online
- G.K. Chesterton
- Chesterton wrote some 200 short stories, including some plays. His best-known character is the priest-detective Father Brown, while The Man Who Was Thursday is arguably his best-known novel.
- Some of his fiction works include: Manalive, The Ball and the Cross, The Club of Queer Trades, The Innocence of Father Brown, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Trees of Pride, The Wisdom of Father Brown.
- These and many more are Available Online or for purchase, such as: * The Complete Father Brown
- Robert Hugh Benson
- Come Rack! Come Rope!
- Lord of the World
- Oddsfish!
- Dante
- Purgatorio, Inferno, Paradisio
- Also see Dante Aligieri: Divine Comedy, Divine Spirituality by Robert Royal a text and commmentary
- Miguel de Cervantes
- Don Quixote