“With storytelling finesse, Antonio Monda has written a compact and forceful book that might be a morbid erotic tale out of Boccaccio, exposing the tormented lust of the clergy.” —Philip Roth
“A meditation on the contradictions of a calling that demands both a sensitivity to the beauty of God’s creation and the restraint to remain detached from its most intense pleasures.” —The New Yorker
“With elegance, grace, and clarity, Antonio Monda depicts a crisis of faith and longing in New York.” —Colum McCann, National Book Award–winning author of Let the Great World Spin
“Passionate, singular. . . . Gives us a whiskey priest for the ages.” —Mary Karr, author of The Liars’ Club
“A striking novel about an unlikely priest, one who is alive with contradictions. This is a beautiful meditation on faith, sex, frailty, and, above all, love.” —Cathleen Schine, author of The Three Weissmanns of Westport
“Monda has miraculously entwined two distinct genres that turn out to unexpectedly and beautifully illuminate each other: the novel of urban nostalgia . . . and the memoir of spiritual struggle, which has its roots in St. Augustine’s Memoirs—a work that haunts Monda’s in more ways than one.” —Daniel Mendelsohn, author of An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic
“A moving exploration of suffering and happiness and an examination of the shame of sin and the thrill of yearning. . . . Paint[s] an intimate portrait of a man besieged by the tumultuous collision of doctrine and desire.” —Booklist
“Makes the terrestrial feel holy. . . . Monda proves himself a worthy interlocutor of the spiritual and the secular alike.” —Publishers Weekly
