Letters from the Flesh [Hardcover]

C. S. Lewis' 1942 theological fantasy The Screwtape Letters gave us the letters of an elder demon to his nephew, advising the young devil how to manipulate a mortal into falling from grace. Donnelly cleverly echoes the design and themes of Lewis' classic, albeit in two sets of alternating letters. The first set is composed by an extraterrestrial living on Earth in the time of Christ; the second consists of a microbiologist's e-mails to her cousin, a public-school biology teacher. The sardonic spins Donnelly puts on Lewis' Christian message arise from the happenstances that the ET has accidentally invaded the body of Saul of Tarsus, who--unwittingly, in this context--then gives rise to modern Christianity, and the microbiologist is a pro-evolution Darwinian battling Creationist parents. Donnelly masterfully interweaves suspenseful confrontations and theological debate into both time-frames while wittily demonstrating that the worldviews of science and religion aren't as divergent as they seem. Some few readers may find its subject matter offensive, but this is an entertaining and thought-provoking book. Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

"A biting and highly entertaining intellectual delight."
-SF Weekly

"A compelling reading experience. . . . Those who can embrace Donnelly's inspired use of religious backdrop will find two genuinely personal stories that offer unexpected revelations."
-scifidimension.com

"An unexpected delight."
-Locus Magazine

Letters from the Flesh, the second book by new SF novelist Marcos Donnelly, sets a breathtaking pace, tackling far-reaching themes like evolution, fundamentalism, quantum realities, and the very core of human nature. The novel is a fictional collection of two sets of letters united by a single secret, but separated by two thousand years:

- the first-century epistles of a non-physical alien entrapped in the body of St. Paul the Apostle, accidentally triggering the birth of Christianity;

- the emails of microbiologist Dr. Lillian Oberland, a young college adjunct writing to her cousin Michael, a public school biology teacher facing the wrath of Creationist parents.

The letters reveal a relationship far deeper than passing coincidences-and signal that cousin Michael's unexpected conversion to fundamentalism might have interspecies consequences that cross the millennia.

Donnelly first published short fiction in the early 1990s, appearing in such venues as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science fiction, Amazing Stories magazine, and Bantam's Full Spectrum anthologies. His first novel, Prophets for the End of Time, was published in 1999. Donnelly's work has been praised by the New York Review of Science fiction as "utterly gripping, very funny, and very clever"; noted by Asimov's Science fiction for its "wry wisdom, comic zip, and brio".