Minyan — John J. Clayton

Ten engaging interwoven short stories about the lives of people who meet weekly at a synagogue to pray. Each story is told from the point of view of a different character and deals with issues like narcissism and love, brokenness and repair. Sam Schulman, prayer leader for the minyan, appears in a number of stories. The stories and the book as a whole deal with narcissism and love, with brokenness and repair. There's a kindness and spiritual longing that make this book unusual in a cultural era of emptiness, nihilism, darkness. These are stories that, even when comic, even when tragic, believe in the human spirit.