Perhaps the most Catholic book I’ve ever read, Andrew Michael Hurley’s unsettling 2014 debut novel The Loney is about an Easter week, church-trip-gone-awry along a particularly violent stretch of the UK coastline: called the Loney. In the 1970s, a small parish journeys to Coldbarrow, where a shrine to Saint Anne is to be the stage for one of God’s greatest miracles: healing the sick— one of their own— a mute teenager named Hanny. The Loney’s prose mesmerizes as it swallows you up. Though not without an abundance of grim, it’s a story with a tender heart about superstition and ritual, miracles, suicide, the Troubles, and Catholicism’s hypocrisies, like its hatred of and impression of witchcraft for its own benefit.

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