Modern Gods

By: Nick Laird

Narrated by: Deirdre O'Connell

Length: 11 hrs and 35 mins

Publisher's summary

A powerful, thought-provoking novel about two sisters who must reclaim themselves after their lives are dramatically upended.

Alison Donnelly has suffered for love. Still stuck in the small Northern Irish town where she was born, working for her father's real estate agency, she hopes to pick up the pieces and get her life back together. Her sister Liz, a fiercely independent college professor who lives in New York City, is about to return to Ulster for Alison's second wedding, before heading to an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea to make a TV show about the world's newest religion.

Both sisters' lives are about to be shaken apart. Alison wakes up the day after her wedding to find that her new husband has a past neither of them can escape. In a rainforest on the other side of the planet, Liz finds herself becoming increasingly entangled in the eerie, charged world of Belef, the subject of her show, a charismatic middle-aged woman who is the leader of a cargo cult.

As Modern Gods ingeniously interweaves the stories of Liz and Alison, it becomes clear that both sisters must learn how to negotiate with the past, with the sins of fanaticism, and decide just what the living owe to the dead. Laird's brave, innovative novel charts the intimacies and disappointments of a family trying to hold itself together, and the repercussions of history and faith.

©2017 Nick Laird (P)2017 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

"Modern Gods has realer-than-real characters, unexpected turns of plot into unknown corners of the world, and language that finds its way through the darkest moments and states of mind to shine its clear bright light, revelatory and unforgiving. And it encompasses deep - the deepest, thorniest - questions of faith and redemption, fate and forgiveness." (Michael Chabon)

"Modern Gods is at once remorselessly clear-eyed about human frailty in the aggregate and full of loving kindness for human beings as individuals. The taut prose reveals a poet's hand, and the dialogue a playwright's ear; Laird can nail an entire character in one acutely perceptive description, and he channels Amis in richly-suggestive transitions that crystallize the truths of well-wrought scenes. Ferociously intelligent, radically contemporary, deeply affecting, stunning." (Matthew Thomas)

"In Modern Gods, Nick Laird takes two experiences poles apart and unites them in gorgeous language, with the same fierce tenderness as he employs in his poetry. It's about families, tribes, peoples - and if you're a member of any of those you'll find a home both strange and familiar in this story." (Dave Eggers)