The Strange Children (Novel)

Old friends have convened at the Tennessee home of Sarah and Steve Lewis. Their gathering, witnessed and recorded solely by Lucy, Sarah and Steve’s nine-year-old daughter, involves the happenings, both usual and unusual, which can encompass everyday life: reminiscences of good and interesting times in the tropics of St. Tropez; dinner preparations and party games; livestock inspections and examinations of conscience; religious revivals and hints of infidelity. Yet beneath the stillness of the surface simmers a fundamental tension of life—the tension between authentic purpose and agnosticism, between a life divinely ordained in a particular direction and one of wandering across “a darkling plain.”

The second of two novels Caroline Gordon wrote after her conversion to the Catholic faith, The Strange Children was deemed “a beautiful book” by Flannery O’Connor, thanks to the dramatic development of grace in its characters. A finalist (alongside The Catcher in the Rye and Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun) for the 1952 National Book Award, The Strange Children is a sophisticated portrait of life, rendered with the peculiar talent of a child.

Paperback, 250 pages.