"Carrère has managed to renovate the idea of what nonfiction writing can be. Profoundly intimate, historically and philosophically serious but able to cast compulsive narrative spells, Carrère’s books are hybrids, marrying deep reporting to scholarly explorations of theology, philosophy, psychology, personal history and historiography . . . Carrère has managed to write one masterpiece after another . . . The need to understand the role you have in the larger human story is at the heart of this beautiful, difficult book. Difficult not in form but in feeling, The Kingdom manages to get at the contradictions of what we call intimacy." ―Wyatt Mason, The New York Times Magazine

"An amazingly various book, [The Kingdom] narrates the author’s crises of religious faith in the nineteen-nineties; combines conventional history and speculative reconstruction to describe the rise of early Christianity; deftly animates the first-century lives and journeys of Paul, Luke, and John; and attempts to explain how an unlikely cult, formed around the death and resurrection of an ascetic lyrical revolutionary, grew into the established Church we know today . . . What makes The Kingdom so engrossing is this element of personal struggle, our sense that the agnostic author is looking over his shoulder at the armies of faith, as they pursue him to the wall of rationality.” ―James Wood, The New Yorker

"To open the pages of this book is to fall into a world of speculation, memoir, history, and belief and disbelief in untidy measures. . . . a masterwork that takes readers into the heart of Christianity’s first days, as well into the depths of the author’s psyche. . . . The only category it really belongs in is tour de force." ―Ilene Cooper, Booklist (starred review)

"Memoir, fiction, and history combine in a stirring portrayal of the world of the first Christians . . . A passionate, digressive, empathetic history of religious rebels and the mystery of faith." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred Review)

"The latest from Carrère (Limonov) is a tale of modern and ancient Christianity, filtered through a text that’s equal parts memoir, academic essay, and fictional exploration. . . . a frequently fascinating book written by a curious, sharp mind." ―Publishers Weekly

"Emmanuel Carrère [is] one of the best known and most innovative French writers." ―Rachel Donadio, The New York Times

"I left the Catholic Church at thirteen and have not spent much time thinking about religion since then. But Emmanuel Carrère's The Kingdom kept me pinned to its pages until the end. It is personal and rigorous, skeptical and open, casual and profound, and its speculative portrait of Saint Luke, its main character, is as compelling as any fictional life I've read lately." ―Luc Sante, author of The Other Paris

"My favorite books about Christianity are Augustine's Confessions, Origen's Contra Celsum, and, now, Emmanuel Carrère's The Kingdom. Both a pocket history and a gripping (and surprising!) intellectual self-portrait, I know of nothing else quite like it ―and I wish like all hell I'd written it. Carrère is one of our planet's most compelling, inimitable writers, and The Kingdom is, in my view, his greatest book yet." ―Tom Bissell, author of Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve

Emmanuel Carrère, born in Paris in 1957, is a writer, scriptwriter, and film producer. He is the award-winning, internationally renowned author of Limonov, The Mustache, Class Trip, The Adversary (a New York Times Notable Book), My Life as a Russian Novel, and Lives Other Than My Own, which was awarded the Globe de Cristal for Best Novel in 2010. For Limonov, Carrère received the Prix Renaudot and the Prix des Prix in 2011 and the Europese Literatuurprijs in 2013.

John Lambert has translated Monsieur, Reticence, and Self-Portrait Abroad by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, as well as Emmanuel Carrère’s Limonov. He lives in Nantes with his wife and three children.