Summer vacation brings the suggested reading list kids bring home from school. Here are our suggestions for the grown-ups fiction and nonfiction titles in which religion and spirituality play a role, but without proselytizing or offering self-help platitudes.

The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch

Post-apocalyptic novels are all the rage, but the reviews for this book promote it as an instant classic of speculative fiction (aka science fiction). The year is 2049 and the Earth is beset by global warming and a band of space marauders who siphon off its waning resources. Enter a potential savior, a young woman from the countryside who can unite the surviving creatures to fight back. Her story is told by Christine Pizan, who tattoos Joans saga on her own body as a form of protest.

Faith factor: Joan is a futuristic Joan of Arc on a spiritual quest, this time across the world, not just France. The character of Christine Pizan is drawn from the 16th-century Italian writer Christine de Pizan, a contemporary of Joan of Arcs who wrote a famous biographical poem about her.

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What the critics say: Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Jeff VanderMeer (whose own novel, Borne, is being hailed as one of the years best) called it a brilliant and incendiary new novel, which speaks to the reader in raw, boldly honest terms, full of maniacal invention and page-turning momentum.

All The Rivers by Dorit Rabinyan

Ah, the eternal enticement of the Romeo and Juliet story. This one is between Liat, an Israeli, and Hilmi, a Palestinian, who meet while visiting post 9/11 New York City. Can their love survive the conflict between their countries?

Faith factor: The book, translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen, focuses more on the cultural and political conflict between the characters. The protagonists different religions are backdrop to their story. The author has said of the story, My real subject was Liats fear that her Jewishness would dissolve into her partner Hilmis Arab identity.

What the critics say: Author Amos Oz called the book astonishing and said, Even the (asymmetrical) tragedy of the two peoples does not overwhelm this precise and elegant love story, drawn with the finest of lines. Some Israeli readers were less ecstatic the book was banned in Israeli schools.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Another pair of star-crossed lovers, Nadia and Saeed, populate this novel, which takes place among refugees in an unnamed city in the midst of unrest. Allegory alert: Magical doors open between people and places. Nadia and Saeed step through one together, entering new lives in new places that will threaten their relationship.

Faith factor: The main characters are both Muslims, but religion is something they take on and off, like a garment. Saeed thinks prayer is a ritual that connected him to adulthood and to the notion of being a particular sort of man, a gentle man, a man who stood for community and faith and kindness and decency, a man, in other words, like his father.

What the critics say: Michiko Kakutani, chief book critic for The New York Times, said, Hamid has created a fictional universe that captures the global perils percolating beneath todays headlines, while at the same time painting an unnervingly dystopian portrait of what might lie down the road.

The Yoga of Maxs Discontent by Karan Bajaj

Max, a young man with a tragic past, reaches Harvard and Wall Street. But when his mother dies, he questions the meaning of life and gives everything up to journey to India and find answers.

Faith factor: Yogic spiritual practices are key to Maxs enlightenment. The author is a Hatha Yoga instructor who lives in an Indian ashram.

What the critics say: Reviews are mixed. Bajaj is best at balancing the tensions of place and practice: Indias privilege and poverty, Maxs mind and body, yogas mix of the spiritual and the terrestrial, Publishers Weekly said. Kirkus concluded, Do not try this at home.

The Road to Jonestown by Jeff Guinn

There are already enough Jonestown books to fill a library. But in this one, Guinn, a former reporter, draws on his investigative skills to literally retrace the Rev. Jim Jones footsteps from Indiana church pastor to jungle madman.

Faith factor: Jones was a Disciples of Christ pastor before he was a mass murderer. Many of his followers thought he was Jesus, while others thought his religious faith was a tool. But they all followed him into the jungle.

What the critics say: Jim Jones Jr., the surviving son of the Rev. Jim Jones, said, The level of research and detail in The Road to Jonestown is the best ever, and really lets readers understand not only what happened, but how and why.

The Islamic Jesus by Mustafa Akyol

Jesus is revered as a prophet by Muslims, and in this book, Akyol, a Turkish journalist and a Muslim, takes the non-Muslim reader through Jesus life and times as told in the Quran.

The faith factor: Did we mention its about Jesus and Islam?

What the critics say: The book has received glowing reviews, with a few quibbles. Most critics have focused on the last chapter, What Jesus Can Teach Muslims Today. In it, Akyol says of Jesus, The three great Abrahamic religions of our battered world, despite all the past and present tensions between them, come together. ... Whether we are Jews, Christians or Muslims, we share either a faith followed by him, or a faith built on him, or a faith that venerates him.

Pontius Pilate: Deciphering a Memory by Aldo Schiavone

Drawing on the historical accounts of Josephus and Philo of Alexandria as well as the New Testament, Schiavone re-examines what might have happened when Jesus and Pilate met.

Faith factor: Schiavone, a classicist, tries to suss out the real from the fictional in the Gospel story of Pilate.

What the critics say: Schiavones account nicely lures Pilate out of the shadows, albeit briefly, even providing a measure of rehabilitation, Randall Balmer said in The New York Times Book Review.

The Sound of Gravel by Ruth Wariner

Growing up in a fundamentalist Mormon enclave, the author had 41 siblings and underwent beatings, neglect and sexual abuse. Happy ending alert: She and three of her sisters escaped and Wariner became a high school Spanish teacher.

Faith factor: Wariners father, the founder of a break-away Mormon sect, was considered a prophet and her mother felt she was anointed by their marriage.

What the critics say: Spare, precise prose lifts what could have been a mawkish misery memoir about a wretched childhood in a fundamentalist Mormon redoubt into an addictive chronicle of a polygamist community that bred helplessness, dependency and fear. Boris Kachka in New York magazine

My Utmost: A Devotional Memoir by Macy Halford

Halford grew up reading the Christian classic My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers and found it a great comfort as an adult navigating New York City. Here, she explores Chambers life, the story behind his perennial book and its effect on her own life and work.

Faith factor: Halford grew up a Southern Baptist. Chambers became a minister.

What the critics say: Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Carlene Bauer said the book will be most enjoyed by those who share Halfords background as well as those who struggle, or struggled, as Halford did, to reconcile the person who wants to believe with the person who wants to think.

Organ Grinder: A Classical Education Gone Astray by Alan Fishbone

What if a biker got a masters degree in the classics and philosophy and wrote a memoir? Spoiler alert: He does.

Faith factor: Fishbone drives off into explorations of the nature of the soul, weighing faith against skepticism. Oh, and he hears voices, which may or may not be God talking to him.

What the critics say: Fishbones mental mazes, irrepressibly personal, sexed-up, funny philosophical, and unconventionally spiritual, make for thought-provoking, entertaining reading. Annie Bostrom in Booklist

EXTRA CREDIT

The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America by Frances FitzGerald

Just lifting this 740-page book could qualify as exercise. FitzGerald, a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award winner, traces the influence evangelicals have had on American politics and culture, making this a book vital for anyone who wants to understand how we got to where we are now.

Faith factor: While the book focuses on a history of American evangelicalism, it also delves into its branches Pentecostalism and Christian fundamentalism.

What the critics say: The reviews of this book are not just glowing, theyre on fire. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Alan Wolfe called it a page turner and said, We have long needed a fair-minded overview of this vitally important religious sensibility, and FitzGerald has now provided it.

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Joan and Jonestown among our favorite new faith books - The Morning Sun