The Nimbus: A Novel [Hardcover]

Named a best book of the year byThe New YorkerandThe Washington Post

A riveting debut novel about a child whose literal enlightenment sets the stage for an exuberant tragicomedy of marriage, religion, and parenthood

On an otherwise ordinary fall day on a university campus in Chicago, the toddler son of an ambitious divinity school professor named Adrian Bennett mysteriously starts to glow. The nimbus, as the strange, soft light comes to be known, offers no clues to its origin and frustrates every attempt at rational explanation.

Though it appears only intermittently, and not to everyone, the nimbus quickly upends the lives of all those who encounter it, including Paul Harkin, Adrians broke and feckless graduate student, who likes being a graduate student a little too much for his own good; Renata Bennett, Adrians omnicompetent wife, who cant see the otherworldly glow; and Warren Kayita, a down-on-his-luck librarian and aging divinity school alumnus on the run from a violent criminal. As news about the nimbus spreads around the university and beyond, Adrian, Paul, Renata, and Warren are set on a collision course that will threaten their lives and put their deepest convictions to the test.

At once a rollicking intellectual satire, a searing portrait of a family in crisis, and a thrilling metaphysical page-turner,The Nimbusoffers a comic and profound examination of the persistence of spiritual belief in a secular age and humanitys timeless search for meaning.

Robert P. Bairdgrew up in Northern California, studied mechanical engineering and human biology at Stanford, and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He has worked as an editor atThe New Yorker,Harpers Magazine,The Paris Review,Chicago Review, andEsquireand has published journalism, essays, and reviews in those magazines and other outlets. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife anl0