Erotic History of a Country Baptist Church

Allan Gurganus, “one of the best writers of our time” (Ann Patchett), burst onto the scene with the acclaimed bestseller Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. With the long-awaited and relentlessly naughty The Erotic History, Gurganus returns with his first major novel in three decades. Brimming with peccadillos, financial corruptions, and libidinal entanglements, The Erotic History maps the sinful trajectory of a church in Falls, North Carolina, from its erection in 1889 to its collapse in the 1970s, told through the lives of three preachers and their parishioners, who are as fixated on sex as on prayer. Brimming with rapturous parables and laced with paroxysmal humor, Gurganus speaks of what must remain unforgiven. As he soars into the secular, then the improbable, Falls’s crazed richness washes over us like a small-town chorus—the people’s cries building to a devastating yet ecstatic climax, with Gurganus, our literary preacher, offering one word soon taken up by all. “Amen!”