Realms of Glory — Catherine Fox

How will it all end? Come, dear reader, and join with the good and the bad of the Diocese of Lindchester as they navigate their way through the storms of 2016. What does the year hold in this best of times, this worst of times; this season of bake-offs and food banks, of muscular theological hope and hand-wringing theological despair? We will peep through many a stained-glass window in pursuit of answers.

Will the new bishop - dubbed Steve-angelical by his detractors - impose the evils of management on the timeless beauty of Anglicanism? Will kind Dean Marion collude with him? Will Archdeacon Matt be the next bishop of Barcup - and what will Jane think of that? And will Freddie - more lovely than a summer's day, though far less temperate - finally find love and happiness?

Times are dark in this, the final volume of the Lindchester Chronicles, but we may yet glimpse a touch of radiance around the grubby edges of our characters. So let us soar as best we can on Anglican wings, towards those unseen Realms of Glory.

'Catherine Fox's glorious Lindchester series is the twenty-first-century answer to Trollope's Barchester - but Trollope was never so funny, so fundamentally kind, or so mischievously attentive to grace.'
Francis Spufford, author of Golden Hill