Nicola Barker

The holy sinner

With little to go on, says Nicola Barker, Michael Haag has cunningly constructed an imaginative, sympathetic portrait of the seductive ‘13th disciple’

issue 09 April 2016

Many of the great faith narratives (the Holy Quran being a notable exception) are clumsy, rough-hewn things; makepiece amalgams of different texts from an abundance of sources that have been gradually hacked together over hundreds — sometimes even thousands — of years. Most have been found useful or resonant (spiritually and politically) at various stages in history, and some have been purposefully engineered (by individuals or institutions with agendas — their motives pure or otherwise).

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