The Kingdom

The sensational international bestseller from one of France’s greatest living writers: an epic novel telling the story of Christianity as it has never been told before.

Corinth, ancient Greece, two thousand years ago.

An itinerant preacher, poor, wracked by illness, tells the story of a prophet who was crucified in Judea, who came back from the dead, and whose return is a sign of something enormous. Like a contagion, the story will spread over the city, the country and, eventually, the world.

Emmanuel Carrère's astonishing historical epic tells the story of the mysterious beginnings of Christianity, bringing to life a distant, primeval past of strange sects, apocalyptic beliefs and political turmoil.

In doing so Carrère, once himself a fervent believer, questions his own faith, asks why we believe in resurrection, and what it means. The Kingdom is his masterpiece.

‘There are few great writers in France today, and Emmanuel Carrère is one of them.’ – The Paris Review

‘The Kingdom, a huge bestseller in France, is thrilling, magnificent and strange.’ – The Sunday Times

Noted for his fascination with ‘the gap between the banality of everyday life and the wild wastes of his imagination’ Emmanuel Carrère is one of France’s bestselling and most widely respected authors, he’s also relatively unknown in the UK. Often blurring the lines between fiction and non-fiction, biography and imagination, Carrère’s books include a troubling search for his grandfather’s history, A Russian Novel, a harrowing real-life account of being caught up in the Sri Lankan tsunami, Other Lives But Mine, and the Capote-esque true crime account, The Adversary, as well as a dark investigation into the heart of Putin’s Russia through the life of a dissident rebel and activist, Limonov.