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Overview
Aside from his blatant lack of piety -- and the fact that he's Jewish -- Father Edmond Music could have been a model priest. Now, entrenched at an English estate with a vast library, he would rather pursue a decades-old liaison with his housekeeper than crack down on his assistant's dial-a-confession phone ministry, or, more important, investigate the whereabouts of a rare Shakespeare text gone missing on his watch.
Then, out of nowhere, penance comes due. His car is found totaled (possibly by Vatican hit men), his annoying archrival of the cloth is looking to nail him as a thief, and the once-passionate housekeeper is lapsing into religious fervor. With his forty-year idyll falling apart, Edmond can no longer ignore the danger of the present, or the echoes of his buried past.
National Jewish Book Award-winning author Alan Isler delivers a hilarious and touching literary homily, confirming his unique gift for mingling comedy and tragedy in this deeply moving exploration of faith, love, and identity.
Synopsis
Despite the inconvenient fact of his Jewish birth, Edmond Music chose the priesthood as a career. Entrenched at an English estate possessed of a fabulous library, he is pursuing a liaison with the Irish housekeeper, Maude. One day, Father Music's car is found wrapped around an Oak tree -- blessedly, without Edmond inside.
Washington Post Book World - Donna Rifkind
The impossibility of faith in an age of great wickedness is the theme of nearly every novel about the Holocaust, and is certainly not a new idea here. But Isler's idiosyncratic voice, with its literary echoes and keen appreciation for paradox -- comedy mixed with tragedy, sinners who are sinned against, quests for "the spark of goodness at the heart of evil" -- deepens and transforms a familiar subject into something rich and strange and not easily forgotten.
Editorials
Donna Rifkind
The impossibility of faith in an age of great wickedness is the theme of nearly every novel about the Holocaust, and is certainly not a new idea here. But Isler's idiosyncratic voice, with its literary echoes and keen appreciation for paradox -- comedy mixed with tragedy, sinners who are sinned against, quests for "the spark of goodness at the heart of evil" -- deepens and transforms a familiar subject into something rich and strange and not easily forgotten.— Washington Post Book World