True Fire - by Bart Van Es (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The Costa Prize Book of the Year-winning biographer gives us a St. Augustine for our time: fresh, urgent, tackling big questions about faith and sin, sex, redemption, just war, and the fiery fall of Rome with soul and penetrating insight.

The man we know as Saint Augustine was born in a small village in North Africa, on the outer edge of a decadent Roman empire. His mother was Christian, but he was intellectually curious and dabbled in other faiths. When he was seventeen, a teacher saw something in him and encouraged him to study in Carthage. It wasn't long before he was teaching rhetoric in Milan, living with a mistress, and carousing with friends. How did this precocious dandy, drunk on word play, end up as one of the most formative Christian thinkers and philosophers of the Western world? How did the sensitive, intimate, probing author of the Confessions come to write City of God, an elaborate project to order the universe in light of the unbending laws of God?

Bart van Es's thrillingly original account of Augustine's life journey carries us from his carousing youth and conversion to Christianity to his fiery denunciations of original sin in a fallen world. We follow him in his desperate flight from the sack of Rome as he joined a stream of refugees and discover, in his tortured effort to make sense of the destruction he witnessed, echoes of our own times. Who are we speaking to when we have an internal monologue? Augustine was unusually close to his mother, who died in his arms in Ostia, waiting for a boat to take them back to Africa. He confided to her in his letters, but in the Confessions, he poured his soul out to God.

Groundbreaking in its approach to the telling of a life, Bart van Es's True Fire captures the anguish of a young man in crisis seeking truth and redemption, and speaks with a burning intensity to our impatient, desire-filled, unrooted times.

About the Author

Bart van Es is a professor of English literature at the University of Oxford and the author of The Cut Out Girl, which won the Costa Prize for Biography and Costa Book of the Year, the Biographer's Club Best First Biography Prize, and was translated into sixteen languages. He was born in the Netherlands and lived in Norway, Dubai, and Indonesia before settling in the United Kingdom. He has written several scholarly books on Shakespeare and Renaissance literature.