Reviewed...

Michael O'Brien's most recent novel, Island of the World (Ignatius, 2007), by The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Theodicy isn't a word you hear bandied about in casual conversation, but the question it raises is familiar enough:

How come there's so much evil in a world many believe has been created by a loving God?

In particular, how come it so often afflicts the innocent?

These questions have become central to the work of Canadian novelist Michael D. O'Brien. They were addressed in his last two novels - A Cry of Stone and Sophia House - and they are addressed once more in Island of the World.

His protagonist this time is Josip Lasta, born in 1933 in a Croatian village whose name, Rajska Polja, means "fields of heaven."

As the novel opens, Josip is about 10. His father is the village schoolmaster. Thanks to the village's remoteness, it has so far pretty much escaped the horrors World War II.

Read the entire review. The novel is also reviewed by the Guelph Mercury newspaper:

This novel of love and war is not for the faint-hearted. The story begins in pre-Second World War Herzegovina and finishes in post-partition modern Croatia. The hero is caught up in the horrors of war as a young boy, surviving the destruction of his whole way of life in the mountains of Herzegovina to grow up in Communist Yugoslavia and then become a political prisoner in a horrible island prison camp.

He eventually escapes to America and becomes an apartment building janitor in New York City, where he restores his belief in God.

The twist to the story involves a great love in his life, his wife Ariadne in Yugo-slavia. He had been separated from her and their unborn child and later had been devastated to hear that both had died.

Now, by accident, he learns that his wife is still alive and is now married to a rich New Yorker. What does he do about this? That I will leave to the reader to find out.

Michael D. O'Brien has written several readable novels, but this one is more than readable. I could not put it down and read it over three days, much to the detriment of my other obligations.

It is a novel of breadth and depth, interspersed with poetry ranging from the Iliad to poetry written by the hero himself. The poetry has a quality to it in my opinion, but that is for the reader to experience.

• The Opening Pages of Island of the World: A Novel | Michael O'Brien
• Hell on Earth and the Hope of Heaven | An Interview with Michael D. O'Brien about Island of the World
• Author page for Michael O'Brien | Ignatius Insight