'Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude'

Modern Baptists Paperback

Modern Baptists

James Wilcox

When Bobby Pickens’s half-brother, F.X. – ex-con, ex-actor and ex-husband (3 times) – moves in with Bobby in Tula Springs, Louisiana, things just seem to go wrong. It’s only a matter of weeks before Bobby finds himself involved in a theft, a hit-and-run collision, a nervous breakdown, unemployment, assault and battery, a number of fouled up romances, and charges of degeneracy brought by the lunchroom attendant at Tula Springs High. It finally takes a Christmas Eve party in a cabin in a poisoned swamp to sort out the tangled affairs of Tula Springs and, in the process, to reveal to Bobby and his friends the pain and sweetness of living life with a full heart and a generous spirit.

Modern Baptists is one of five novels either set in or involving characters from Tula Springs, Louisiana, a fictional town James Wilcox has made as real as Barbara Pym’s North Oxford or Armistead Maupin’s Barbary Lane.

Reviews of Modern Baptists

  • Praise for James Wilcox:

    ‘Wilcox is a highly polished comic performer.’
    Observer

    ‘Wilcox has a sophisticated control of pace, his humour the chill of home truth, and his squibs at the expense of small-town America are rarely off-target.’
    Jim Crace, TLS

    ‘It’s not easy to write a really original novel… Yet Wilcox manages to do just that in his very funny book, MODERN BAPTISTS.’
    Daily Telegraph

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