After a very hard life, Lila is homeless when she steps into a small town church for shelter from the rain, and begins a relationship with the elderly minister. It’s a novel about the inner life of a woman trying to make sense of her experiences and what she learns about God. It is a tender love story that explores deep themes of loneliness, existence, privilege, kindness, loss, love, and hope.
Oh, the devastating, crushing, lack of grace and mercy in Graham Greene’s Catholicism! Major Henry Scobie, deputy police commissioner in a British colony in Africa during WWII, is a decent, truthful, and dutiful man, who feels, very deeply, the burden of his wife’s unhappiness. When it appears he will be passed over for promotion, his wife is unable to cope, and Scobie goes against his principles to borrow money for her passage to South Africa. This mistake sends him into a terrible fall towards damnation. It is a colonial novel, and a Catholic one, and though bleak, it is utterly compelling, with its themes of duty, passion, theology, love, and truth. I listened to the audiobook, and found it very easy to listen to.
rrlreads 