The Kingdom (ALLEN LANE) - Softcover

Emmanuel Carrere, novelist, filmmaker, journalist, and biographer, is the award-winning internationally renowned author of The Adversary (a New York Times Notable Book), Lives Other Than My Own, My Life As A Russian Novel, Class Trip, Limonov and The Mustache.

Emmanuel Carrere is said by many to be one of the best writers in France, if not Europe, yet in Britain he is hardly read. This may be about to change. The Kingdom, a huge bestseller in France, is thrilling, magnificent and strange -- Bryan Appleyard * Sunday Times * An utterly brilliant book... Carrere is a vivid guide and a knowledgeable one -- Catherine Nixey * The Times * Brilliant, shocking... a genre-bending book of great flair: a tribute, and indeed a monument, to the power of literary invention -- Tim Whitmarsh * Guardian * A novelised memoir that vividly captures the drama of the Christian experience... A celebration of religious imagination - Catholic, French, Judaic, Hellenic - The Kingdom has been a runaway bestseller in France. In Britain, it may succeed as a relief and an antidote -- John Cornwell * Financial Times * I left the Catholic Church at thirteen and have not spent much time thinking about religion since then. But Emmanuel Carrere's The Kingdom kept me pinned to its pages until the end. It is personal and rigorous, skeptical and open, casual and profound, and its speculative portrait of Saint Luke, its main character, is as compelling as any fictional life I've read lately -- Luc Sante, author of The Other Paris My favorite books about Christianity are Augustine's Confessions, Origen's Contra Celsum, and, now, Emmanuel Carrere's The Kingdom. Both a pocket history and a gripping (and surprising!) intellectual self-portrait, I know of nothing else quite like it -- and I wish like all hell I'd written it. Carrere is one of our planet's most compelling, inimitable writers, and The Kingdom is, in my view, his greatest book yet -- Tom Bissell, author of Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve Emmanuel Carrere takes us on an trip from Greece to Rome and Jerusalem, an extraordinary adventure that is fun and at times reminiscent of Monty Python's Life of Brian * Les Inrocks * An astonishing book... wildly popular * Paris Match * One of the most shocking books of the year * L'Express * Erudite, ironic, trivial, thoughtful, life-changing * Telerama * A beguiling writer... Graceful and important -- John Freeman * NPR * There are few great writers in France today, and Emmanuel Carrere is one of them * Paris Review * One of the best known and most innovative French writers -- Rachel Donadio * New York Times *