Elizabeth Strout, author of Amy and Isabelle, explores grief and redemption in her second novel, which examines what happens when a young minister's life becomes unmoored from its anchors after the death of his wife. Set in a small Maine town in 1959, Abide With Me describes Tyler Caskey's bewilderment as he becomes increasingly estranged from God and himself. He no longer has what he calls "That Feeling," the strong sense that God is present everywhere in the world around him and that there is a purpose to everything that happens, whether or not it can be understood or is welcomed.

As Tyler's life comes undone, his congregants, who once listened avidly to his sermons and came to him for solutions to their problems, and opened their hearts to him, have closed their hearts to both him and his kindergarten-aged daughter. This is a novel whose beauty and power sneak up on you. I didn't realize how deeply I was engaged with the characters (whether they played large or small parts in the plot), the town of West Annett, and Tyler's struggles to understand what is happening to him, until I discovered that even when I wasn't reading the book I was worrying about how Tyler would reclaim his equilibrium, whether the townspeople would get it together and stop being so nasty in their gossip, and if Tyler's daughter Katherine would turn out all right.

Strout is a boundlessly compassionate writer: It's not that she loves her characters blindly as some writers seem to, but rather that she sees them whole and accepts them with all their flaws and grace. This luminous novel - which sounds as though it might be both goopy and soppy - instead, it's a book to cherish.