I was looking forward to reading this book but ended up being profoundly annoyed by it.Billed as a 'state of the nation' novel about life in Britain in the early 90s it has a good premise. A left-wing young liberal Anglican priest is appointed to plant a church on a rough estate in Newcastle, and he gets to know the local New Labour MP and a local 'security consultant' who turns out to be a mafia-style gang leader. Eventually everything goes belly up.
But sadly Richard Kelly hasn't got a clue about church life - he doesn't know about the role of a vicar, doesn't know how the term Reverend is used, doesn't know what evangelicals believe, doesn't know what goes on at PCC meetings, doesn't know what a church service is like. That, and the fact that it is littered with ungrammatical sentences, scuppered the whole book for me.
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