If you think a novel about a saint is likely to be a dry and dusty sort of thing, think again. Godric, a 12th-century saint--born of Anglo-Saxon parents in Norfolk almost to the year of the Norman invasion (1066 for those of you long unschooled!)--was a peddler and wanderer long before he settled into the life of a hermit in northern England, led there by the famous hermit St Cuthbert, who tells him, "your true nesting place lies farther on", and "until you reach it, every other place you find will fret you like a cage."

In Godric Frederick Buechner captures the voice and the times of this saint with a style that recalls the richly alliterative language of Middle English poetry. So too does it recall the beautiful earthiness of that literature, reminding us that this time of deep spirituality was also a time of real flesh and blood folk. And in some ways this is the pivotal point of this delightful (and at times comic) novel: these saints, like those that live among us today, become saints not by leaving the body behind but by finding a way to live more deeply within it. They find a way to turn it to glory. --Doug Thorpe