A01=Robert P. Baird
Author_Robert P. Baird
campus
Category=FBA
Category=FS
Chicago
debut novel
divinity school
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_nobargain
faith
family
graduate school
graduate student
halo
literary fiction
literary novel
marriage
parenthood
parenting
professor
religion
religious studies
satire
spirituality
university
Product details
- ISBN 9781250392657
- Weight: 542g
- Dimensions: 163 x 243mm
- Publication Date: 21 Jul 2025
- Publisher: Henry Holt & Company Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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 the nimbus appears only intermittently, and not to everyone, the otherworldly glow quickly upends the lives of all those who encounter it, including Paul Harkin, Adrian’s broke and feckless graduate student, who likes being a graduate student a little too much for his own good; Renata Bennett, Adrian’s omnicompetent wife, who can’t see her son glowing even though the nimbus is turning her life upside down; and Warren Kayita, a down-on-his-luck librarian and aging div 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 Nimbus offers a comic and profound examination of the persistence of spiritual belief in a secular age and humanity’s timeless search for meaning.
Robert P. Baird holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School, and has worked as an editor at The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, Esquire, and Chicago Review. He has written for all those publications, as well as for The New York Times, The London Review of Books, The Guardian, and Poetry, among others. His work can be found at www.robertpbaird.com.
