The series
A calm new order settles over the world, and almost everyone is relieved. In country after country, an ordinary person lives that settling, each learning, too late or just in time, to tell the true light from the one that is almost the same.
Arthur Sutton is the churchwarden of St Botolph's in Aldcaster, a market town in the Lincolnshire fens, and he is very good at it. A retired surveyor…
Erin Brandt is twenty-nine and the broadcast and media director at Beacon Church, a megachurch in the Virginia suburbs of the capital. She directs…
Hannah Reid is the heart of Fairer, Safer — a thirty-one-year-old community nurse working the growth corridor on Melbourne's south-eastern edge…
Josh Calder is Hannah's fiancé — a tall, warm, easy-to-like New Zealander who works on the national identity-and-payments rollout reshaping how the…
Kang Min-ho is Seo-yeon's husband of twenty years: a corporate middle manager by day and, at Saebit Central, the layman who runs the church's…
Lee Seo-yeon is the heart of The Lampstand: a forty-seven-year-old senior researcher at a church-funded cult-counselling centre in Seoul, and the…
Sabine Krüger is past fifty-five, divorced, a hospice social worker in Neukölln, and for the first time in her life she is wanted. Three winters ago…
Behrouz is the Lydia-Gemeinde's electrician, a spare, upright man somewhere in his sixties, with grey at the temples and his reading glasses pushed…
Cam is Mel's husband — an electrician in his late thirties, big, steady, and gentle, the practical backbone of the church community. He reads the…
Chloe Sutton is Arthur's granddaughter, Martin's eldest: twenty, quick, warm and entirely without side. She works in London on the people side of the…
Deacon Baek Ji-hoon is Seo-yeon's colleague at the counselling centre: somewhere in his fifties, soft-spoken, heavy in the shoulders, with a face…
Diane Brandt is Russell's wife and the keeper of the Brandt table: the Sunday candle, the pot roast and her own bread, the porch light lit in the…
Eleni Reid is Hannah's mother — a warm, formidable Greek-Australian matriarch and the engine of the Oakleigh family home. Devout in the ritual…
Jess is Hannah's closest friend and fellow community nurse — twelve years on the rounds together, fast, funny, sharp, and cheerfully unreligious. She…
Kang Ha-eun is Seo-yeon and Min-ho's daughter: twenty, halfway through a university degree, and the warmest person in a careful house. Two evenings a…
Lee Seo-jin is Seo-yeon's younger sister, six years her junior, and the person the finest heresy-tester in the country could not bring home. At…
Lena is Sabine's daughter: twenty-eight, kind, and partnered with Anni. For most of her adult life she has done what her mother thinks of as the…
Martin Sutton is Arthur and Sylvia's son, around forty, and a civil servant in Whitehall. He is married with three children: Chloe, the eldest, is…
Mel is the warm centre of Hannah's church family — about thirty-five, married to Cam, mother of two small children, and the woman who first taught…
Micah Brandt is Erin's older brother: thirty-three, built like the linebacker he almost was, a head and a half taller than his sister and still able…
Pastorin Rike Albrecht leads the Lydia-Gemeinde, and you feel her before you see her. When she comes into the parish hall with her coat over her arm…
Russell Brandt founded Beacon Church in a converted carpet showroom, doing his own sound and getting it wrong in front of forty people on folding…
Sylvia Sutton was Arthur's wife, and she died eighteen months before the story opens. For forty years she sat at the aisle end of the same pew, three…
Ulrich was Sabine's husband for twenty-six years and is Lena's father: a decent, sensible, secular man who makes his coffee too strong and has never…
Yiayia Despina is Hannah's grandmother — a Greek widow of around ninety, tiny and frail in body but undimmed in mind. She lived through the…
Yun Soon-ok is Min-ho's mother: ninety, small, neat and still upright, and the grandmother of the family Seo-yeon married into. She prays at dawn…
Anni is Lena's partner, and the person every toddler at the Lydia-Gemeinde makes for the moment she comes through the door. She spends half of each…
Doreen Pickersgill is in her eighties and has been at every early service anyone can remember: second pew, good coat, handbag on her knee, eyes shut…
Doro is Sabine's dearest friend at the Lydia-Gemeinde: a retired GP of about Sabine's own age, warm, sensible and impossible to shock. She runs half…
Frank Buckley is Rev. Hale's deacon, an old veteran in a good worn jacket who stacks the folding chairs after the service himself because he won't…
Jenna Cole met Erin at nineteen, two scholarship girls in a dorm full of rich kids, and the friendship set hard in the first month and never came…
Margaret is an elderly widow of the Henty Street congregation — small, soft-spoken, and easy to overlook, with a quiet, settled steel beneath. She…
Marlene runs the urns at the Lydia-Gemeinde's Thursday soup nights, a ladle in one hand, reaching over to stir the big pot of lentils without…
Nick Reid is Hannah's older brother — sharp, self-assured, and modern, the family's pragmatist who has always believed in going along to get along. A…
Pastor Dave Brooke has shepherded the Henty Street congregation for eleven years — a warm, comfortable, outreach-minded minister loved for keeping…
Pastor Emmanuel leads the Ghanaian fellowship that rents the parish hall under St Botolph's on Sunday afternoons, for forty pounds a month. Forty or…
Peter Reid is Hannah's father — a lean, quiet Anglo-Australian who married into the Reid family's Greek world four decades ago and has been its calm…
Preston Wells is a movement strategist working inside Beacon: in his forties, a good plain suit, a face you'd forget on the street and remember in…
Priya is Josh's coordinator on the rollout programme — bright, decent, and apologetic, the warm human texture of the office building the new system…
Reg Connolly is Hannah's first patient on the community round — a fiercely independent eighty-one-year-old in the last fibro house on a road the…
Rev. Marcus Hale pastors a small, poor church across the river from Beacon, and Erin is sent over with a brief that calls him a holdout. He is…
Rev. Oh Kyung-tae is the senior pastor of Saebit Central, a brilliant expositor in his sixties and the builder of a church of forty thousand. He…
The Reverend Sally Henshaw is vicar of St Botolph's and four other parishes besides, which is to say she is tired. In her forties, she runs five…
Ron Tasker is the bell captain at St Botolph's and Arthur's oldest friend; they have known each other sixty years. He runs a band of six, drills them…
Sophie Reid is Hannah's younger sister — twenty-three, the quiet "baby" of the family, watchful and still working out who she is. She observes far…
Aldcaster is a small market town in the Lincolnshire fens, in flat drained country where the tower of St Botolph's is the highest thing for eleven…
Beacon Church is a megachurch in the Virginia suburbs of the capital: ten thousand seats, three services every Sunday, and a livestream reaching more…
Until I Come is set in present-day Berlin, in Neukölln: courtyard blocks and corner shops, buses sighing along Karl-Marx-Straße, the döner place…
Cardinia Hospital and Community Health is Hannah's working world — the busy public health service covering the growth corridor, where she nurses the…
Rev. Hale's church sits across the river from Beacon, with the towers of the capital pale on the far bank. The roof leaks, and a white five-gallon…
Henty Street church is the spiritual home of the story's small community — a plain brick building in the corridor, warm, unpretentious, and…
Mel and Cam's place is the warm, busy heart of the church family — a lived-in weatherboard at the unfashionable end of the line, all back-door…
Saebit Central is a Seoul megachurch of forty thousand members, and the spiritual home of Seo-yeon's family. It is busy, disciplined and awake before…
The Lampstand is set in present-day Seoul, a city that verifies everything: every card, every login, every entry to worship logged and counted. The…
St Botolph's is Aldcaster's great medieval parish church: eight hundred years of stone, Grade One listed, riding above the fen like a ship run…
The Brandt family home is the domestic heart of The White Stone — a suburban house near the capital where four generations of one family have lived…
The Corridor is the world of Fairer, Safer — the outer south-east growth corridor of Melbourne, where new housing estates run out into paddock and…
The cult-counselling centre is where Seo-yeon works: a church-funded ministry in Seoul where families come when someone they love has vanished into a…
The world of Fairer, Safer tightens not through soldiers but through admin — checkpoints and scan-points, welfare-check teams in soft polo shirts…
The Lydia-Gemeinde is a busy, warm congregation in Neukölln, and its parish hall is the heart of it. On Thursdays the long tables go end to end for…
The MCG — "the G" — is the secular cathedral of Melbourne, the great stadium where the whole state gathers on Grand Final day. In Fairer, Safer it…
The Reid family home in Oakleigh is the warm Greek-Australian heart of the story's family scenes — a narrow brick house up the line from Hannah's…
The White Stone is set in the commuter suburbs of Virginia, just outside the capital: strip malls and county lines, gravel turn-offs to family houses…
Thessaloniki is the setting of the prequel novella The Bread of the Stranger — the great Greek port city, once the heart of Sephardic Jewish Europe…
Assure is the national identity-and-payments credential at the centre of the story's near-future world — the app you carry and the green "Verified"…
In the vestry safe, at the end of the row of registers, stands a fat government-issue book stamped FIRE PRECAUTIONS LOG, its covers gone soft at the…
NIPA — the National Identity & Payments Authority — is the government body that merged the country's identity and payments systems into a single…
Clearing her late mother's flat, Sabine finds a box at the bottom of the sideboard, under the tablecloths. Beneath old documents, ration books soft…
The registers of St Botolph's hold the town's christenings, marriages and burials, name by name. The current volume lives in the vestry safe with the…
The reader is the small grey box at the gate, the turnstile, the serving hatch and the church door, the everyday face of a society that likes to know…
The Teilhabe-Pass is Germany's new credential, and its name is the first thing people like about it. Teilhabe means participation, having a share, a…
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