Clerical Errors: A Novel

From the National Jewish Book Award-winning author of The Prince of West End Avenue comes a sparkling new novel that confirms Alan Isler's unique gift for mingling comedy and tradgedy.

Despite a severe lack of piety and the inconvenient fact of his Jewish birth, Edmond Music chose the priesthood as a career. Much to the Vatican's chagrin, he is entrenched at an English estate possessed of a fabulous library. There, he would rather pursue a decades-long liaison with his Irish housekeeper, Maude, than crack down on his assistant's dial-a-confession phone ministry. He would rather immerse himself in his study of an eighteenth-century Jewish mystic, the epigrammatic Pish, than deal with a Shakespeare quarto gone missing on his watch.

Then Father Music's car is found wrapped around the famous Stuart Oak (blessedly, without Edmond inside). Are Vatican henchmen to blame? What's more, Edmond's persistent nemesis, the American priest Twombly, is headed to town, eager to prove Edmond a thief. And the once passionate Maude is having an inconvenient religious revival. With his forty-year idyll thoroughly disrupted, Edmond can no longer ignore the present danger. Nor can he evade the reach of his buried past.

Rife with Alan Isler's characteristic wit and wordplay, "Clerical Errors" is a deeply moving exploration of a world of faith, love, and identity, a world lost and found again, perhaps too late.