7 Books Like Fire & Light

Dag Hammarskjöld was the second Secretary General of the United Nations, from 1953 until his death in a plane crash in 1961. He was widely admired as an outstanding man of action on the international scene and a peacemaker. (He is the only posthumous recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.) After his death, a manuscript of his secret, intimate diary was discovered – a diary of the soul. It was first published in 1964 and was a revelation for thousands of readers around the world. I first read it in a Polish translation (when I was still living in Poland, under a communist regime), and it was a revelation to me too. In mid-2025, I re-read it in a beautiful English translation by the poet W.H. Auden and Swedish-American scholar Leif Sjöberg (also published in 1964) and have been reading and copying snippets from it ever since. Here are some… show more.

A novel which I particularly enjoyed this year is Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede. Honoured as a Virago Modern Classic, published originally in 1969, it was re-published in 2025 by Cluny - a marvellous publisher specialising in re-issuing classic Christian literature. The “House of Brede” is a Benedictine Abbey in England, based closely on a real monastery (Stanbrook Abbey), though obviously fictionalised. My interest in this book was sparked by the fact that a friend of mine, a mature-age professional, entered a Benedictine monastery recently, and I thought that this novel would give me some insight into her new life and the world which she is now inhabiting. I was not disappointed: the book was an eye-opener for me, providing amazing imaginative access to a world apart – the world of a Benedictine Abbey, a life of unceasing work and prayer focussed entirely on “the true horizon”,… show more.

My experience shows that this book can be a lifesaver for anyone living with depression, chronic anxiety, or a troubled heart. 

It offers a Christian take on how to achieve interior freedom and preserve it in troubled times. A friend of mine told me that there was a period in her life when she wouldn’t leave her house without taking this book with her.

In fact, I have often done this myself. The sense of freedom from external circumstances that I could find when reading a page from this book in hard places, at hard times, was extraordinary.

The author, Jacques Philippe, a member of the Community of the Beatitudes, has a special appeal to modern readers, and many say he has helped them to attain a peace of heart.

I have read this book three times. 

As a Christian and a lifelong reader of historical fiction and of books on Christianity, I loved this book and couldn’t put it down.

“Theophilos” is the mysterious addressee of Luke’s Gospel. O’Brien imagines him to be the adoptive father of Luke. In the novel, Luke becomes deeply absorbed in the stories that people who knew Jesus personally tell him and decides to chronicle them as a historian. Theophilos travels to Palestine to try to rescue Luke from the “madness” of Christianity.

The book is an extraordinary feat of historical and psychological imagination. While replete with breathtaking episodes, it is, generally speaking, not fast-paced – one often stops to ponder a sentence, or a reflection – yet it is also a thriller.

My autistic grandson, as a teenager, read this book to me aloud twice; and now, at twenty, he is reading it to me, at my request, but once again with gusto, for the third time.

It is a meticulous and loving chronicle of Jesus’ life, his doings and sayings. I have read many “biographies” of Jesus, but, along with Aleksander Men’s The Son of Man, this is my favourite. The reading of this long book aloud, chapter by chapter, is a joy.

It is dramatic in style, very reliable in details, and sound and insightful in their interpretation. At the same time, the author’s heart is in it, and so is the reader’s. It is nourishment for the soul, as well as for the mind. A splendid book.

This is another big book that my autistic grandson read aloud to me, with enthusiasm, when he was still in his teens.

It is St Paul’s acclaimed biography “by his greatest living interpreter” (so says historian Tom Holland, the author of Dominion). It is a gripping adventure story, following Paul from Tarsus to Rome (“Three times I have been beaten with rods, once I was stoned; three times I have been shipwrecked, a night and a day I have been adrift at sea”) as well as a journey into Paul’s mind and heart.

I loved the scholarship, the narrative mastery, the outer and inner drama of St Paul’s life, so vividly, empathetically, and thrillingly offered to the reader.

For me, Sheridan’s new book was a riveting read – a mind-opening reminder of how early Christians, unbelievably, converted a good part of the classical world and spread Jesus’ radical teaching of love, forgiveness, human equality, and fraternity in a world in which they were total nobodies, scorned, persecuted, tortured, and killed.

Attractively, the book also shows some modern countercultural Christian lives, based on the same Gospel teachings, still capable of acting as a leaven and a sign of hope in the spiritually disoriented Western world.

I found this book extremely refreshing and encouraging, and I have recently given it as a birthday present to a seventeen-year-old granddaughter to inspire her to set herself challenging and God-oriented goals worth living and dying for.