Walker Percy's The Second Coming: This odd tale features a chronically depressed hippie girl and a suicidal middle-aged man. The man comes up with the perfect plan to force God to prove whether or not He exists. The girl comes up with a plan to escape the mental hospital and begin a new, independent life. Their plans go crazily, wonderfully awry, and of course eventually collide. The Second Coming is less known than his National Book Award-winning The Moviegoer (another romance of sorts), but it is our Percy pick. Francois Mauriac's Woman of the Pharisees: A loveless, legalistic woman destroys and undermines both Christian love and love between lovers in this beautifully written novel by the 1952 Nobel Prize winner. A young boy observes his mother's machinations with a detached, almost cynical reporter's eye. Yet grace, not despair, is the theme of the painful and sometimes tragic story. And can romantic love live even under Mauriac's suffering eye? Oh, yes. Walter Wangerin's Book of Sorrows: Follow-up to the excellent Book of the Dun Cow, and filled with the same animal characters, this story is a terribly tragic story of pride and arrogance leading to the heart's destruction. But the intense longing for self-righteousness comes into interplay with a deeper longing still.... James Baldwin's Another Country: This powerful, explicit novel by one of the finest African-American novelists of all time explores sexuality between the races and even between two men. Though it might seem tame today, it shocked in 1962, when it was published. Baldwin's own bisexuality is reflected in these confusing, broken-hearted people struggling to be human in an inhumane, straightjacket culture. Baldwin's own Christian background is reflected throughout, though never with a believer's eye. Instead, the steady, slow current of despair underruns this stunnning work. D.H. Lawrence deserves his own page here, and may get it one day soon. Suffice it to say that Lady Chatterly's Lover is not his most critically-acclaimed novel (Women in Love usually earns that nod), but it is likely his most remembered. Lawrence's sexistential gospel is clearly defined here, as is his horror regarding the dehumanization of men into (almost literally) cogs in the capitalist machine. His morality is rooted in a romantic ideal that is very male (as in overtly sexual). Thus, the adulterous affair between the novel's main two characters is put in a noble light. Despite that, this novel is not pornographic. It contains beautiful moments of communion between the two, as they struggle to find each other, and so themselves. Its failure lies in the failure of romantic love and sexuality to bear a weight meant for agape love. Just a samplin'.... KEEP Checking back for more!