Bread for the Baker's Child

After a quiet absence of nearly ten years, Joseph Caldwell returns with a rich novel of immense and resonant scope. With Dostoyevskian ambition, Bread for the Bakers Child sets out to probe the large questions of good and evil, culpability and sacrifice, the meaning of suffering; his characters are placed at the very center of such contradictory considerations. In this tale of two lives immutably intertwined, Sister Rachel is a nun in a failing order, a painter with a history of madness, devoted to her dying Mother General. Her gay brother Phillip is an accountant serving time for embezzlement, a man capable of great violence and anger who has turned his back not simply on the church, but faith as well. They have nothing in common except for a shared childhood tragedy. Or do they? In this masterful display of structural precision, Caldwell slowly unravels the complementary nature of these two livesat first glance hermetically sealed from one anotheruntil their shared fate becomes a symbiotic relationship, as though they were two sides of the same coin, intersecting and reflecting one another. Through events operatic in tone and reach, until the irrevocable, shattering conclusion, Rachel and Phillip come to redefine our notions of love and kinship, and embody the human need for redemption and forgiveness.