"Always trust a stranger," said David’s mother when he returned from Rome. "It’s the people you know who let you down." Half a life later, David is Father Anderton, a Catholic priest with a small parish in Scotland. He befriends Mark and Lisa, rebellious local teenagers who live in a world he barely understands. Their company stirs memories of earlier happiness—his days at a Catholic school in Yorkshire, the student revolt in 1960s Oxford, and a choice he once made in the orange groves of Rome. But their friendship also ignites the suspicions and smoldering hatred of a town that resents strangers, and brings Father David to a reckoning with the gathered tensions of past and present. In this masterfully written novel, Andrew O’Hagan explores the emotional and moral contradictions of religious life in a faithless age. PRAISE FOR BE NEAR ME "What a powerful writer Andrew O’Hagan has become . . . Be Near Me is an elegy, a love story, a document of an era, beautifully imagined and composed."―JOYCE CAROL OATES "As if it is not enough that Andrew O’Hagan can write like an angel, one has to add that he does it in the rare style of an intelligent angel. What a fine novel is Be Near Me."―NORMAN MAILER "O'Hagan tackles a highly charged subject with exceptional intelligence and subtlety."? The New Yorker   "Always trust a stranger," said David’s mother when he returned from Rome. "It’s the people you know who let you down." Half a life later, David is Father Anderton, a Catholic priest with a small parish in Scotland. He befriends Mark and Lisa, rebellious local teenagers who live in a world he barely understands. Their company stirs memories of earlier happiness?his days at a Catholic school in Yorkshire, the student revolt in 1960s Oxford, and a choice he once made in the orange groves of Rome. But their friendship also ignites the suspicions and smoldering hatred of a town that resents strangers, and brings Father David to a reckoning with the gathered tensions of past and present.   "So subtle and richly hued that it calls the larger society to account. How rare to find a contemporary work . . . rise to treat a Catholic priest with something more interesting than pity or contempt or condescension . . . Be Near Me is the one of the best grown-up stories this year. It is harrowing and beautiful and worth every word." ? The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)   " Be Near Me is about a man distanced from everyone, most especially himself . . . Andrew O'Hagan asks us implicitly to look at our own lives, ask ourselves how clueless we may be, as we try, with courage or cowardice or both, to get from this particular day on to the next." -- The Washington Post   ANDREW O'HAGAN was born in Glasgow in 1968. Be Near Me is his third novel. His second novel, Personality, received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in London and is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books .   Discussion guide available at www.HarcourtBooks.com.   Visit www.HarcourtBooks.com/BeNearMe . ANDREW O'HAGAN was born in Glasgow, Scotland. His previous novels have been awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the E. M. Forster Award. Chapter One Sundial One is never prepared for the manner in which home changes over time. That tea room was twenty-nine years ago. Scotland was my mother’s world, and my years in Blackpool were spent in pastoral oblivion, a kind of homelessness which has followed me everywhere. Lancashire was the place where I grew up, my father’s world, but serving there as a parish priest provided me with nothing much greater than the small comforts afforded in my line by the habits of duty. I wanted to add something new to my mother’s life. She had always been so original, so full of words, so ready with money, the distances between us being no bar to her encouragement of me, her enjoyment of our hard-hearted jokes. But she was growing old. I thought we might do more laughing together and visit the places she liked. The year before last, I came back and took charge of a small Ayrshire parish, to see her, to be close to her, though I can hardly say that the move was made in heaven. Troubles like mine begin, as they end, in a thousand places, but my year in that Scottish parish would serve to unlock everything. There is no other way of putting the matter. Dalgarnock seems now like the central place in a story I had known all along, as if each year and each quiet hour of my professional life had only been preparation for the darkness of that town, where hope is like a harebell ringing at night. It all began to happen on Good Friday. The rectory was pleasant and well-groomed, and my housekeeper, Mrs Poole, brought two large bowls of lettuce soup to the sitting-room table. I had just come back from the second service of the day, feeling tired, with a heaviness in m