Acts of Faith

Acclaim for Acts of Faith

Philip Caputo, from Vietnam onwards, has understood the hardest truths of the modern world better than almost anybody. Acts of Faith is a stunningly unflinching novel. On the surface it is set in Africa, but in fact its true landscape is the ravaged soul of the twenty-first century. Philip Caputo is one of the few absolutely essential writers at work today. -Robert Olen Butler

In Acts of Faith Philip Caputo has fashioned a gripping cast of characters and placed them in a spellbinding story. You can't get any better than that. -Winston Groom

Caputo's ambitious adventure novel, set against a backdrop of the Sudanese wars, makes for a dense, riveting update on Graham Greene's The Quiet American, . . Caputo presents a sharply observed, sweeping portrait, capturing the incestuous world of the aid groups, Sudan's multiethnic mix, and the decayed milieu of Kenyan society. -Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Acts of Faith offers an image of Africa deserving comparison with Conrad, Hemingway, Peter Matthiessen, and Jan de Hartog's forgotten near-masterpiece The Spiral Road, -Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Philip Caputo is a splendid, muscular story teller who possesses the crucial power to make endearing ordinary men from diverse fragilities and stubborness. --Gloria Emerson, Los Angeles Times

For the past twenty years, Caputo has written parables of hubris upbraided, populated by outsiders whose defects lead them into trouble as unerringly as does fate. --David Haward Bain, New York Times Book Review

Caputo lets no one and nothing off the hook. --Richard Bausch, Washington Post Book World

Caputotakes on most of the hot-button issues of our time-racism, random violence, disempowerment, the decay of social fabric, even the nature of evil itself-and more than lives to tell the tale. --Roget L. Simon, Los Angeles Times

Acclaim for Philip Caputo's previous books:

The Voyage

An adventure filled sea story. --Andrea Barrett, The New York York Times Book Review

Genuinely exciting . . . Caputo's prose is a pleasure . . . The ending satisfies completely, adding layers of intriguing meannig to the already rich adventure story. --Debra Spark, Chicago Tribune

A compellig novel that offers both rousing adventure and penetrating insight into the mystery that is family. --Library Journal

A high seas classic combined with a mystery . . . a complicated psychological drama . . . an engaging study of the emotional life of young me . . . their struggles] toward independent adulthood, their rage and love for an unapproachable father. --Paul Kafka, San Francisco Chronicle

Caputo is a conjurer of rich atmosphere; he knows the sea and sailing. But he also knows the ways of building finely shaded characters. Readers will find all his talents on display here.--Brad Hooper, Booklist

Strongly imagined . . . those who plunge headlong into its dark waters will not soon forget the experience. Kirkus Reviews

Exiles

What makes Exiles extraordinary is the lead story, Standing In, . . . Here Mr. Caputo brings fresh subtlety to the psychology of exile. It is one of the most engaging works of fiction he has yet produced. --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times

Philip Caputo is a splendid, muscular story teller who possesses thecrucial power to make endearing ordinary men from diverse fragilities and stubborness. --Glor

A disparate group of men and women confronts their own individual moral crises, fears, and physical dangers as they work to alleviate the hardships and suffering caused by civil war and famine in contemporary Sudan. 60,000 first printing.

Philip Caputo's tragic and epically ambitious new novel is set in Sudan, where war is a permanent condition. Into this desolate theater come aid workers, missionaries, and mercenaries of conscience whosecourage and idealism sometimes coexist with treacherous moral blindness. There's the entrepreneurial American pilot who goes from flying food and medicine to smuggling arms, the Kenyan aid worker whocan't help seeing the tawdry underside of his enterprise, and the evangelical Christian who comes to Sudan to redeem slaves and falls in love with a charismatic rebel commander.

As their fatesintersect and our understanding of their characters deepens, it becomes apparent that Acts of Faith is one of those rare novels that combine high moral seriousness with irresistible narrative wizardry.

From the Trade Paperback edition.