Cover of Under Satan's Sun

Under Satan's Sun

This new translation marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Georges Bernanos's first novel, Under Satan's Sun, a powerful account of intense spiritual struggle that reflects the author's deeply-felt religion. The work develops a theme that persistently inspired Bernanos: the existence of evil as a spiritual force and its dramatic role in human destiny. This haunting novel follows the fortunes of a young, gauche, and fervent Catholic priest who is a misfit in the world and in his church, creating scandal and disharmony wherever he turns. His insight into the inner lives of others and his perception of the workings of Satan in the everyday are gifts that fatefully come into play in the priest's chance encounter with a young murderess, whose life and emotions he can see with a dreadful clarity, and whose destiny inexorably becomes entangled with his own.

Themes
religion
Setting
1920s
Subject
philosophy
Audience
adult
Length
medium · 257 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked Under Satan's Sun? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Under Satan's Sun. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Retreat Without Song Shares fiction, classics
  2. The Horseman on the Roof Shares french, classics, french literature
  3. Free onlineFree
    The Counterfeiters Shares french, french literature, fiction
  4. Le Grand Meaulnes Shares french, classics, fiction

“People who read Under Satan's Sun tend to reach for these next.”

  1. The Journal of Jules Renard
  2. The Interrogation
  3. Viper's Tangle
  4. The Deadbeats

“If you want more of the same (philosophy about religion), start with these.”

  1. The Man Who Died
  2. Remembrance of Things Past: Volume II - The Guermantes Way & Cities of the Plain
  3. The Adventures of Telemachus
  4. Free onlineFree Poor White

“If it was the french that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Thérèse Desqueyroux
  2. A Dark Stranger
  3. Theseus
  4. Free onlineFree Tartarin of Tarascon

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Markings
  2. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess
  3. The Divine Milieu
  4. The Prince: Faith, Abuse and George Pell