Recommendations
Books Like The Power and the Glory
What to read after The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory (1940) is the great English Catholic novel — a whisky priest, alcoholic and the father of an illegitimate child, hunted through the jungles of revolutionary Mexico as the last priest left in the state. Still as morally serious as when it was written, and still the most compressed expression of the Catholic theology of grace. These novels will find you in the same territory.
- 1Buy
The Quiet American
by Graham Greene
Greene's other masterwork — Fowler, Pyle, and Phuong in 1950s Saigon; less explicitly Catholic but the same portrait of a morally compromised man navigating an impossible situation; many readers consider it Greene's finest novel, and the two together give you the full range of his mature fiction
- 2Buy
The Heart of the Matter
by Graham Greene
Scobie, a police officer in British West Africa during World War Two, whose pity and Catholicism destroy him — the most directly Catholic of Greene's West African novels; where The Power and the Glory asks whether grace can work through a sinful priest, The Heart of the Matter asks whether a man can be damned by his own compassion
- 3Buy
Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
The other great English Catholic novel of the same decade — Charles Ryder's friendship with Sebastian Flyte and the Flyte family, and the 'twitch upon the thread' by which divine grace draws them back; where Greene's Catholicism is dark, tropical, and tragic, Waugh's is elegiac and English and ultimately consoling
- 4Buy
The Razor's Edge
by W. Somerset Maugham
Larry Darrell's search for spiritual meaning after World War One — Maugham's most philosophical novel and the secular equivalent of what Greene and Waugh are doing with Catholicism; where The Power and the Glory is about grace working through a sinful priest, The Razor's Edge is about a man who achieves something like enlightenment through a more personal, less dogmatic spiritual quest
- 5Buy
The End of the Affair
by Graham Greene
Maurice Bendrix and Sarah Miles in wartime London — the most personal of Greene's Catholic novels; Sarah's conversion to Catholicism after a moment in a bombed-out house is the most direct engagement with the question of grace in all of Greene's fiction; shorter than The Power and the Glory and more autobiographical
- 6Buy
The Mission
by Robert Bolt
The Jesuit missions in eighteenth-century South America, where Portuguese and Spanish colonial powers destroy what the priests have built — the cinematic companion to The Power and the Glory's Catholic engagement with colonialism and institutional power; the same question (what can individual faith do against political power?) in a different South American setting and a century earlier
- 7Buy
Silence
by Shusaku Endo
A seventeenth-century Jesuit priest in Japan during the persecution of Christians — the Japanese Catholic novel that most directly parallels The Power and the Glory: a priest under persecution, the question of whether God is present in the silence of suffering, the apostasy that may or may not be the greatest act of faith; Martin Scorsese's 2016 film adaptation brought it to a new audience
- 8Buy
Our Man in Havana
by Graham Greene
Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana recruited as a British spy — Greene's own favorite among his 'entertainments,' and the comic inversion of the moral seriousness of The Power and the Glory; where the whisky priest is a real priest in a real danger, Wormold is a fake spy in an absurd situation; reading both shows the full range of Greene's fictional imagination
More The Power and the Glory Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.