As many NR readers surely know, our senior editor David Pryce-Jones is not just a renowned historian but also the author of ten novels. His 1979 novel Shirley’s Guild — which I had never read before last night — has just been reissued by the small British publisher Capuchin Classics, and I think it’s one of his best. The plot involves apparitions of a recently deceased little girl in a Welsh village, and the book has much to say about the survival of mankind’s religious impulse in the post-Enlightenment West. Religion gets somewhat more respect in the broader culture than it did at the time the book was written, but the issues at stake are in many ways even more vital now than they were then. The book is already available at amazon.co.uk.