Die wahre Geschichte vom Verschwinden eines Pastors

Adultery, real estate, and religion collide in this new novel from "a bitterly funny" ( The New Yorker ) writer. Reverend Thomas Mosher, the young black pastor of the Pilgrims' Congregational Church in W---, Massachusetts, has vanished without a trace. Does the rumored affair between Thomas and Bethany Caruso, unhappily married mother of two, provide an explanation? Did Thomas's esoteric final sermon, "The Shapes of Love" (positing that God is an "infinite sphere"), contain a clue? Did the overwhelmingly white, liberal parishioners drive him away? Bethany and the rest of the congregants grapple with the ensuing crises. Chief among Artemesia Angelis, an unusually pious housewife with a fixation on the Puritan "heretic" Anne Hutchinson; Margaret Howard, matriarch of a thriving real estate business; and Bobby Caruso, Bethany's husband, whose lack of interest in church affairs is matched only by his wife's disdain for Bobby's "fornicatorium," a hapless, last-ditch attempt to save their marriage. "Where do people come from?" Bethany asks at the novel's end. "And where do they go? Who makes this world unbearable?" Benjamin Anastas's bold, blisteringly funny, and ultimately haunting satire of modern materialism marks the emergence of an astonishing talent.