Souls and Bodies

Book excerpt: The ups, downs, and exploits of a group of British Catholics--for whom the sexual revolution came a little later than it did for everybody else... In this bracing satire, a group of university students make their way through the fifties and into the turbulent sixties and seventies. We first meet Dennis, Michael, Ruth, Polly, and the others at the altar rail of Our Lady and St. Jude, but soon enough they get caught up in the alternately hilarious and poignant preoccupations of work, marriage, sex, and babies--not always in that order. A satirical comedy in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh, Souls and Bodies take an unblinking look at the sexual revolution and the contemporaneous upheavals in the Catholic Church. The result is as unsettlingly true as it is funny.