any good Catholic fiction?

[Theoketos]

[quote name='Totus Tuus' date='Sep 5 2005, 09:10 PM']MICHAEL O'BRIEN, Comma, Chesterton!
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[daveybe]

4 Recommendations:

1. [url="http://www.ffbooks.co.uk/n0/n970.htm"]A Canticle for Leibowitz[/url], by Walter M. Miller, Jr. It's a Catholic classic. A serious, heavy book, but it will not disappoint you.
(don't bother with the sequel though. the author had a faith crisis late in life, and the sequel is very cynical)

2. Also, Msgr William Doty wrote some delightful 1950s era novels about Catholic life.

3. [url="http://www.katherinevalentine.com/"]Katherine Valentine[/url] is sorta like a Catholic Mitford series. Charming books, and a new one's on the way!

4. I find Jon Hassler's novels quite rewarding. "A Green Journey" is one of his best.

[jgirl]

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (he actually wrote all kinds of books)

Therese Desqueyroux and The Viper's Tangle by Francois Mauriac

[avemaria40]

The Third Miracle was good. It's about a priest who lost his faith and he is postulator in a cause for a woman's canonization. He meets the woman's atheist daughter and they both find faith together. Also, When We Were Saints is good. It's about a fourteen year old guy whose grandfather, who was a Protestant, dies telling him he's a saint. Then, he meets this Catholic girl who teaches him about spirituality and miracles and he starts going through a dark night of the soul, only to start going to a Catholic church

[Extra ecclesiam nulla salus]

brideshead revisited.

[Extra ecclesiam nulla salus]

when we were saints was really good

[Maria]

You guys have already listed most of the ones I was going to say, but I don't think anyone's mentioned In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden (I think it's the best of her fiction, but she's got other stuff as well). There are the Vision books that are for tweens, I guess -- they're at a lower level than the Louis De Wohl books. There's [url="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1931555133/104-0640206-6406315?v=glance"]Come Rack, Come Rope[/url], which is a fictionalized story of Catholics in the Elizabethian era. We have a delightful book called The Man Who Sold Christmas, about a franciscan who God told to spread the message of Christmas in New York, and the conflict that created with his superior's understanding of spreading the good news. I whole-heartedly endorse anything CS Lewis. I find most of the Chesterton fiction aside from the Father Brown stories a little hard to get through because they don't really have plots; they're more weird senerios and how they follow through. Saints stories in general, if they are not too dryly biographical, are good as stories with Catholic heroes.

On a slightly different vein, I like books like The Von Trapp Family Singers and Maria Von Trapp's other books, Karen and With Love From Karen, But For the Grace of God (more or less the story of the founding of Italy's Boys' Town, by the founder), Pillar of Fire, Pillar of Truth by Karl Stern, etc.