The First Day of Christmas: Athol Dickson

Athol Dickson’s Lost Mission is one of the best books I’ve read this year. And there’s a story behind its publication, as in, the publisher screwed up and forgot to do the things publishers are supposed to do. Okay, it happens. But it’s worse than a shame it happened to as fine a novel as Lost Mission.

I reviewed the book in October; you can read the review here. I had no idea what had happened to the book until I read Dickson’s blog post on the Advent season, “Peace During Advent.” There’s more information about the book and the author at Dickson’s web site.

If you’re not familiar with Athol Dickson, you should be. He’s writing really fine fiction. My first experience with his writing was The Cure, about what happens to a town in Maine when people here there’s a cure for alcoholism there. Then I read Winter Haven, about a young woman who travels to an island off the coast of Maine to identify the body of her long-missing brother, a body, almost perfectly preserved for years, that washes up on the shore. And there’s River Rising, a novel about the 1927 Mississippi River flood that’s of special interest to me, who grew up about a mile from that river in New Orleans and who currently lives about 13 miles due west of it in St. Louis.

For me, discovering Athol Dickson was like opening up a whole new world of fiction – Christian fiction unlike any I had ever read. And Dickson led me to other writers (and you should let him lead you to them as well).

Read Athol Dickson. Read him. He’s better than good.

(Over at the High Calling Blogs, we’re celebrating the 12 days of Christmas by highlighting a blog or web site of someone besides ourselves during this season of Advent and Christmas.) (Which is what we should be doing the other 353 days of the year as well.)