Héctor Abad's new novel traces a circle around faith and desire through the lives of Catholic priests who refuse to stay confined by celibacy or doctrine. These aren't tortured men wrestling privately with their vows. They're worldly, educated, caught between the pull of the church and the pull of everything else.
The book moves between countries and centuries, following clerics who pursue love, philosophy, and sensuality with the same hunger they bring to their spiritual work. Abad doesn't treat this as scandal or tragedy. Instead, he examines what happens when men devoted to God also devote themselves to living fully, to intimacy, to the flesh.
What emerges is a portrait of religion that refuses simplicity. These priests don't abandon faith when they pursue desire. They don't choose between two warring selves. The novel suggests that divinity exists in both the sacred and the profane, that a man can love the church and love a person simultaneously without one negating the other.
Abad writes with the precision of a man who understands that theology and biography are sometimes the same story. The result is a book about commitment, contradiction, and the ways we convince ourselves that incompatible truths can coexist.