Unapologetic

First published in the United Kingdom to great acclaim, Unapologetic is a wonderfully pugnacious defense of Christianity. But it isn't an argument that Christianity is true—because how could anyone know that (or indeed its opposite)? It's an argument that Christianity is recognizable, drawing on the deep and deeply ordinary vocabulary of human feeling, satisfying those who believe in it by offering a ruthlessly realistic account of the grown-up dignity of Christian experience. Unhampered by niceness, this is a book for believers who are fed up with being patronized, for non-believers curious about how faith can possibly work in the twenty-first century, and for anyone who feels there is something indefinably wrong, literalistic, anti-imaginative, and intolerant about the way the atheist case is now being made.

Francis Spufford, a former Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year (1997), has edited two acclaimed literary anthologies and a collection of essays about the history of technology. His first book, I May Be Some Time, won the Writers' Guild Award for Best Non-Fiction Book of 1996, the Banff Mountain Book Prize, and a Somerset Maugham Award. His second, The Child That Books Built, gave Neil Gaiman "the peculiar feeling that there was now a book I didn't need to write." His third book, Backroom Boys, was called "as nearly perfect as makes no difference" by the Daily Telegraph, and Red Plenty was one of Dwight Garner's New York Times 10 Favorite Books of 2012. Spufford is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and teaches at Goldsmiths College in London.