I have a lot of Christian books on my bookshelf, but I do like fiction stories as well… can anyone suggest some good Christian fiction books, please?
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This is my favorite. Regular people dealing with problems in a small town, with a hidden fight between angels and demons unfolding all around them. Prayer drives much of the plot, since the angels draw their strength from people’s prayers. It’s good for action and one of my favorites.
You can read it on its own, but starting with This Present Darkness makes the world and characters easier to get into.
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I’d go with The Paradise War by Stephen Lawhead. Two Oxford grad students go through an old burial mound and end up in a world built on Celtic mythology. Around the halfway point it gets really hard to put down.
First book in the Song of Albion trilogy, so there’s more to read if you get into it.
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This is another first in a series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. Millions of people disappear all at once, and the story follows the people left behind as they try to figure out what happened.
A lot of people read this and start reading Revelation alongside the story. There are twelve books in the main series if you end up liking it, so you’d have plenty to read.
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I’d start with Francine Rivers’s Redeeming Love and Ted Dekker’s Circle series.
Also try Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. It reads like a long letter from a pastor to his son, and there’s more theology in it than in half the serious books I’ve bought.
Christy by Catherine Marshall and Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry.
Christy is about a young teacher in the Appalachian mountains who keeps running into poverty and pride that her good intentions can’t fix. A small-town Kentucky barber looking back on his regrets and a faith he never fully figured out.
I’d go with novels since you already have plenty of nonfiction. Ones where the faith comes through the characters rather than the author stopping to preach.
The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas. It’s a historical novel about the Roman soldier connected to Christ’s crucifixion. The Hawk and the Dove by Penelope Wilcock is a human story about grace in a medieval monastery.
If you want something more imaginative, Walter Wangerin Jr.'s The Book of the Dun Cow is a fable about good, evil, sacrifice and redemption. Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River deals with faith and miracles through a family story.
They’re all Christian but they hold up as novels too.
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The faith comes through the characters.
I remember a character’s struggle with grace way longer than I remember the author’s argument. Peace Like a River did that for me. I spent a long time afterward thinking about miracles and mercy because of Jeremiah and Reuben, not because the book was trying to teach me something.
The Book of the Dun Cow is gloriously weird, because a rooster battling cosmic evil shouldn’t work as theology and yet it does.
Christy was the first novel I read where good intentions weren’t enough on their own… The part where she keeps running into the mountain families’ pride and realizes she can’t fix people has stuck with me.
Haven’t read Jayber Crow, but that ‘faith he never fully figured out’ line is what’s pulling me in. Does the book leave his doubts unresolved, or does Berry give him some peace by the end?
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Jayber doesn’t arrive at a tidy set of answers, but his long loyalty to the people of Port William gives his faith a shape. There’s peace in that, even while he still wrestles with God and the church.
Stephen R. Lawhead’s Arthurian saga is worth tracking down. He approaches the legends through a Celtic lens instead of the usual medieval European framing.
The Song of Albion trilogy does something similar with Welsh mythology… Both are distinctly Christian, but not heavy-handed about it.
Not fiction, I know, but I’d still throw in some autobiographies… The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom and God’s Smuggler by Brother Andrew both read like thrillers, except they happened.
If you want actual fiction, This Present Darkness by Frank Perretti scratches that suspenseful itch with fast-paced spiritual warfare stuff.
Hinds’ Feet on High Places by Hannah Hurnard is worth checking out if you liked Pilgrim’s Progress at all.