Modern Gods

A Novel

By: Nick Laird

Narrated by: Sarah-Jane Drummey

A powerful novel about two sisters who must reclaim themselves after their lives are dramatically upended, from an award-winning author with "a wonderfully original and limber voice" (The New York Times)

Alison Donnelly has suffered for love. Still stuck in the small Northern Irish town where she was born, working for her father's real estate agency, she hopes to pick up the pieces and get her life back together. Her sister, Liz, a fiercely independent college professor who lives in New York City, is about to return to Ulster for Alison's second wedding before heading to an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea to make a TV show about the world's newest religion.

Both sisters' lives are about to be shaken apart. Alison wakes up the day after her wedding to find that her new husband has a past neither of them can escape. In a rainforest on the other side of the planet, Liz finds herself becoming increasingly entangled in the eerie, charged world of Belef, the subject of her show, a charismatic middle-aged woman who is the leader of a cargo cult.

As Modern Gods ingeniously interweaves the stories of Liz and Alison, it becomes clear that both sisters must learn how to negotiate with the past, with the sins of fanaticism, and decide just what the living owe to the dead. Laird's brave, innovative novel charts the intimacies and disappointments of a family trying to hold itself together and the repercussions of history and faith.

©2017 Nick Laird (P)2017 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"Laird dazzles eye and ear with his kinetic prose ... with a mere flick of description, [he] summons vast stretches of politics and history ... the dynamism Laird has conjured in New Ulster keeps us reading, and the tragic climax resonates powerfully with the Northern Ireland sections of the novel.” (Jennifer Egan, The New York Times Book Review)

“Society’s darkest impulses are on graphic display in Laird’s novel ... [he] is alive to the way that moral certitudes tend toward violence.” (The Wall Street Journal)

“In his new book, Laird sets out to mix the intimate family drama with the epic novel of ideas ... full of bull’s-eye sentences and sharply drawn characters ... Laird handles it all with tremendous dexterity, energy, and compassion.” (The Sunday Times [U.K.])