In the four weeks since the shortlist was announced on 10 September, Colm Tóibín's The Testament of Mary, about the life of the Virgin Mary after Jesus's death, has led sales of the six shortlisted books, shifting 8,300 copies, according to official Bookscan figures quoted in industry magazine the Bookseller.
He read and thought about the Testaments in just the same way one might think about a novel.
BL 8.10pm, Underbelly (until 28 August) She can sing, act and dance – but the real threat of this show created by Getinthebackofthevan's McCormick is that you will no longer be able to think about the New Testament without associating the Three Wise Men with Christina Aguilera's Dirty – or Doubting Thomas with anal fingering.
We know about the "Heiligenstadt Testament", a letter to his brothers written when the composer, at the age of 31, felt suicidal but vowed to carry on for the sake of his art.
The former at least looks beyond Eliot's most iconic works to a poem he wrote about the New Testament's three wise men, having converted to Christianity and begun to dismiss The Waste Land.
If one discovered a difference in, for example, the genealogies of Jesus as they appear in Matthew's and Luke's Gospels, he argued that these were hermeneutic trip wires deliberately inserted by the holy spirit to make the reader think that bit harder about the New Testament's other meanings – symbolic, ethical and allegorical – rather than the merely literal.
I feel the same way about The Final Testament as I do about its author unsure but intrigued and I keep thinking about it.
James Frey, controversial author of A Million Little Pieces, sits down with us for an exclusive interview about his new novel The Final Testament of the Holy Bible.
By then he was already close to Mary, his childhood sweetheart, and he later said that even as teenagers the two of them would have serious conversations around her kitchen table about how they could close the gap between the institution of church as they knew it and the church they read about in the New Testament.
This kind of giving is about love, the love that the New Testament talks about called agape, a Greek word used in the New Testament that means the love that transcends personal interest for the sake of something bigger.
