We offer our hearty congratulations to Slant author Thom Satterlee, whose novel, God’s Liar, has won the Award of Merit in the 2021 Christianity Today Book Awards.

The citation reads as follows:

Theodore Wesson is a young, ambitious, doubt-filled Anglican curate angling to leave his small country parish. In 1665, he meets a blind stranger named John Milton, who arrives in the village a refugee both from plague and political disfavor. (The great poet has yet to write his masterpiece, Paradise Lost, and much of England regards him as a traitor for his involvement in Oliver Cromwell’s republican revolution.) Milton’s support for the persecuted Quakers widens Wesson’s notions of God. But in time the friendship comes under strain when it threatens his clerical advancement. Is Wesson a reliable narrator? Maybe, maybe not. He is certainly guarded, and well aware of his own brokenness. But this is part of what makes God’s Liar so enchanting. In the end, this is a fine story about faith and doubt, providence and humanity, and the reality of encountering the living and active God. —Cynthia Beach, professor of English at Cornerstone University, author of The Surface of Water