Catholic Fiction: the Canon
Explore the definitive list of canon Catholic fiction books. Discover timeless literary works that reflect Catholic values, teachings, and traditions in compelling stories.
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The Last Gentleman
by Walker Percy
Will Barrett is the last gentleman, a twenty-five-year-old wanderer from the south living in New York City with no plans for the future and detached …
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The Power and the Glory
by Graham Greene
A tormented, alcoholic priest is pursued by an idealistic lieutenant during an anti-clerical persecution in Mexico.
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce
James Joyce's coming-of-age story, a tour de force of style and technique The first, shortest, and most approachable of James Joyce’s novels, A Portrait of …
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The Diary of a Country Priest
by Georges Bernanos
In this classic Catholic novel, Bernanos movingly recounts the life of a young French country priest who grows to understand his provincial parish while learning …
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A Canticle for Leibowitz
by Walter M. Miller
Winner of the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Novel and widely considered one of the most accomplished, powerful, and enduring classics of modern speculative fiction, …
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A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
Ignatius Reilly, the hero, is a grotesque Gargantua, in violent revolt against the entire 20th century and what he takes to be the manifold excesses …
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Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
Captain Charles Ryder, stationed at Brideshead, recalls his boyhood associations with the odd but charming members of an English noble family
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The Violent Bear It Away
by Flannery O'Connor
"A back country orphan struggles to defy his uncle's prophesy that he will become a baptist prophet"--NoveList.
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Death Comes for the Archbishop
by Willa Cather
In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour becomes Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico, and over the next forty years he faces the lawlessness and loneliness of …
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Kristin Lavransdatter
by Sigrid Undset
“[Sigrid Undset] should be the next Elena Ferrante.” —Slate The turbulent historical masterpiece of Norway’s literary master A Penguin Classic In her great historical epic …
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Mariette in Ecstasy
by Ron Hansen
The highly acclaimed and provocatively rendered story of a young postulant's claim to divine possession and religious ecstasy.
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The Man Who Was Thursday
by G. K. Chesterton
G. K. Chesterton's surreal masterpiece is a psychological thriller that centers on seven anarchists in turn-of-the-century London who call themselves by the names of the …
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Memento Mori
by Muriel Spark
Unforgettably astounding and a joy to read, Memento Mori is considered by many to be the greatest novel by the wizardly Dame Muriel Spark.
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The Children of Men
by P. D. James
In 2021, with the human race becoming extinct because of the infertility of all males, Oxford historian Theodore Faron is drawn into the schemes of …
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Strangers and Sojourners
by Michael D. O'Brien
In the aftermath of World War I, an Englishwoman emigrates to British Columbia where she falls in love with an Irish trapper who is escaping …
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In this House of Brede
by Rumer Godden
"A novel of sensitive dedication." --"The Atlantic Monthly" "Rumer Godden deals precisely with the theme of the religious life . . . as representing 'the …
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The Lord of the Rings
by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
Presents the epic depicting the Great War of the Ring, a struggle between good and evil in Middle-earth, following the odyssey of Frodo the hobbit …
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Morte D'Urban
by J.F. Powers
Winner of The 1963 National Book Award for Fiction. The hero of J.F. Powers's comic masterpiece is Father Urban, a man of the cloth who …
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All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The first volume in the Border Trilogy, from the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer …
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Nobody's Fool
by Richard Russo
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Empire Falls, this slyly funny, moving novel about a blue-collar town in upstate New York—and about Sully, one of …
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Deep River
by Shūsaku Endō
Offers a religious vision combining Christian faith with Buddhist acceptance in the story of a group of Japanese tourists who converge at the Ganges River …
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The Betrothed
by Alessandro Manzoni
“The great plague novel.” —The New Yorker Set in Lombardy during the Spanish occupation of the late 1620s, The Betrothed tells the story of two …
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Quo Vadis
by Henryk Sienkiewicz
Translated by Stanley F Conrad. Set around the dawn of Christianity with amazing historical accuracy Quo Vadis? won Sienkiewicz the Nobel Prize. Written nearly a …
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Descent into Hell
by Charles Williams
The key to Williams' mystically oriented theological thought, Descent into Hell (arguably Williams' greatest novel) is a multidimensional story about human beings who shut themselves …
