Crusaders review in Daily Telegraph (Alastair Sooke)
‘Crusaders is a fiercely political novel... Kelly describes social deprivation with a red-hot sense of injustice... The dialogue is superb – Kelly excels at capturing thick, sinewy Geordie dialect...’ Alastair Sooke, Telegraph
Crusaders is a novel by Richard T. Kelly, first published in the United Kingdom by Faber and Faber in January 2008. Its story opens in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in the autumn of 1996. Reverend John Gore, a young Anglican clergyman, returns to his native North-East charged with ‘planting’ a new church in the deprived west of town, largely ignored in the city’s recent regeneration. Gore finds his task aided and complicated by run-ins with three impressive locals: Stevie Coulson, alarmingly muscular chief of Newcastle’s top ‘security consultancy’; Martin Pallister, Labour MP moderniser and advocate of the Christian Socialism dear to his party’s new leader; and Lindy Clark, a tack-sharp single mother, working several jobs to stay afloat. Gore finds he needs the help of all three to bring off his mission. But gradually these same relationships draw him into a moral crisis, one he tries to resolve by a drastic and potentially dangerous course of action.
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