Top ten novels about priests

Clerical characters figure in several of Michael Arditti's novels, including an English missionary priest who fights oppression in Marcos's Philippines in The Breath of Night.

For the Guardian the novelist named a ten best list of fictional clerics, including:

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

The phrase "whisky priest" is routinely attached to several of Graham Greene's characters, but he himself coined it to describe the unnamed protagonist of The Power and the Glory. In contrast to some of his later works where he uses exotic settings as little more than backdrops for western love triangles, Greene here enters fully into the struggle between church and state in 1930s Mexico and his hero's spiritual journey is deeply affecting.

Read about the other clerics on the list.

The Power and the Glory also appears on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best nameless protagonists and ten of the best episodes of drunkenness in literature. It is one of seven books that made a difference to Colin Firth.

--Marshal Zeringue