“A beautiful human story of love, loss, faith and the sometimes uncrossable distances between people” -NPR

This is one of the many positive reactions to Michel Faber’s Book of Strange New Things, our Book Club’s book of the month. Here is another: this wonderful novel depicts not only a love story but much more, it is a book that forces you to set it down at times and truly ponder. Set in a world where space travel allows people to journey to far off planets, it begins with an English preacher, Peter, with his wife, Bea, on Earth and ends with him on Oasis, without his wife. His mission is to preach to the native population of Oasis, which he soon realizes will not all be that difficult since the native “Oasans” are very eager to learn about religion. Yet, the letters from his wife soon turn desperate and worried as things back home worsen in many ways, she begins to lose faith and Peter soon struggles to hold onto the one thing that saved him: religion.

This novel is a beautifully constructed story that mends Peter’s interactions with the natives, with other workers on the base, and with his wife through their letters. Reading Peter’s thoughts and reactions make the book extremely hard to put down, the reader questions till the very end as to whether he will hold on to his faith; this is what makes the book so alluring, it keeps the reader until the end. This book is the right story for anyone who wants to read a story unlike many others and for anyone who wants to travel to another world and have their thoughts challenged.