Themes
Books About Faith and Doubt
For the big questions — belief, god, religion and the void.
20 books · ranked
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1
Dune
Politics, religion and ecology on a desert planet that holds the key to the galaxy; the towering epic of the genre.
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2
Sapiens
A sweeping history of humanity from the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa to the present, arguing that what made humans uniquely powerful was the ability to create and believe in shared fictions — nations, religions, money — that allowed large-scale social cooperation impossible for other species. One of the bestselling non-fiction books of the 21st century.
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3
The Fire Next Time
Two searing essays on race, faith and America; as urgent now as when they were written.
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4
Mistborn: The Final Empire
A street thief joins a crew plotting to overthrow an immortal god-emperor, using a brilliantly worked magic of metals.
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5
The God of Small Things
Twins, forbidden love and a single terrible day in Kerala; lush, fractured and unforgettable.
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6
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass's account of his life in slavery — learning to read despite prohibition, the brutal violence of the system, and his eventual escape. Written to prove that he had indeed been enslaved (some doubted his account given his eloquence), the Narrative is one of the foundational texts of American literature and abolitionism.
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7
Schindler's Ark
The documented story of Oskar Schindler — a German industrialist, bon vivant and opportunist who used his Kraków factory to save over 1,200 Polish Jews from extermination, spending his entire wartime fortune bribing SS officers. Keneally's Booker Prize-winning novel-as-biography draws on interviews with Schindler's Jews and presents an unlikely hero who was also flawed, unfaithful and self-serving.
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8
American Gods
Shadow Moon, recently released from prison, takes a job with the mysterious Mr Wednesday and finds himself at the centre of a war between the old gods brought to America by immigrants — Anansi, Odin, Anansi, Czernobog — and the new gods of media, technology and globalisation. Gaiman's novel is a myth of America as a land that forgets its gods.
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9
The Kaiju Preservation Society
Jamie Gray, laid off at the start of the pandemic, takes an unusual job that turns out to involve travelling to an alternate dimension where enormous kaiju — Godzilla-scale creatures — live in a vast wilderness that needs protecting from both the kaiju and the humans who'd exploit them. Scalzi's Locus Award-winning novel is fast, funny science fiction adventure, written partly as what he's called 'a pop song' after a difficult creative period.
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10
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Janie Crawford, a Black woman in early 20th-century Florida, tells the story of her three marriages and her search for love, self-determination and voice. Hurston's novel was rediscovered by Alice Walker in the 1970s and is now central to both the Black literary tradition and the feminist canon.
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11
The Color Purple
Celie writes letters to God and to her sister Nettie from the American South of the early 20th century, charting her journey from abuse and silence through love, friendship and creative voice to a hard-won selfhood. Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is one of the defining works of American feminist literature.
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12
The Mercy of Gods
Humanity, having spread to a distant world, is conquered by the Carryx — an ancient, incomprehensible alien empire that absorbs species into its vast collection of subject civilisations. The Mercy of Gods, by the writing team behind The Expanse, begins a new space opera series about survival under genuinely alien, indifferent conquest — won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
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13
Waiting for Godot
Vladimir and Estragon wait beside a barren tree for someone called Godot who never arrives. Beckett's theatre of the absurd has no plot, no backstory and no resolution — only the endlessly repeated condition of waiting, which turns out to be a precise image of human existence and the stories we tell to fill it.
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14
Antigone
After her brothers kill each other in civil war, Antigone defies the king's decree to bury the brother deemed a traitor, choosing divine law over human authority. Sophocles's tragedy raises questions about conscience versus the state, individual duty versus political power, that remain as urgent as they were in ancient Athens.
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15
Brideshead Revisited
Charles Ryder, a poor Oxford student, is drawn into the wealthy Catholic Flyte family through his friendship with the charming Sebastian, and into their sumptuous country house. Waugh's elegiac novel — told in retrospect by an ageing Ryder — traces the Flyte family's decline and Charles's reluctant confrontation with religious faith, loss and the vanished world of the English Catholic aristocracy.
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16
The Power and the Glory
In a Mexican state where Catholicism has been outlawed, a whisky priest — the last in the region — is hunted by a pursuing lieutenant as he moves from village to village. Greene's novel is a profound examination of guilt, faith and human fallibility: the priest knows he is a bad man, but continues to administer the sacraments anyway.
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17
Paradise Lost
Satan falls, corrupts Eden, and humanity loses paradise — told in twelve books of blank verse that Milton intended as a justification of God's ways to man. One of the great monuments of English literature and one of the most ambivalent: Satan is so compelling that Blake claimed Milton was secretly of the Devil's party, and readers have disagreed ever since.
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18
Circe
Circe, daughter of Helios, discovers she has the power to transform men into animals — and must navigate a world of gods, monsters and heroes while finding what she actually is. Miller's novel recasts a figure from the Odyssey as the protagonist of her own story, questioning what power means for a woman the ancient world considered marginal.
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19
Wise Blood
Hazel Motes returns from the war to Tennessee determined to found the Church Without Christ — a religion without need of redemption. O'Connor's first novel is grotesque, violent and relentlessly theological: a black comedy about someone who resists grace so hard that grace comes for him in the most brutal possible way.
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20
The Alchemist
An Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago travels from Spain to Egypt following a dream of treasure, guided by the concept of a Personal Legend — the path one is meant to take. Coelho's spiritual parable has sold over 150 million copies and is one of the most-read books in history, presenting a philosophy of destiny, signs and the courage to follow one's heart.