A masterful return from one of the greats of contemporary American fiction.
In 1970s Memphis, two boys lock in battle. They’re best friends, but when your body floods with longing, sometimes all you can do is fight. Years later, while tending his dying mother at a Christian camp, Rory Singleton meets a teenager who shows him the raptures of sex—a summer that awakens something he’ll spend a lifetime trying to bury.
Rory becomes a pastor of a thriving megachurch, his life built on secrets and careful silences. But when he’s sent to Africa to promote a homophobic crusade, the contradictions become unbearable. A reckoning begins—one that will take him from the pulpit to underground queer spaces, from respectability to radical honesty, and finally to a confrontation with everything he’s built and everyone he’s betrayed.
With echoes of James Baldwin and Flannery O’Connor, Paul Russell crafts a devastating portrait of American evangelicalism’s war on desire, and one man’s reckoning with the wreckage it leaves behind.
