Peter Costello
Lydia: A Story, by Paula Gooder (Hodder and Stoughton, £9.99 /€11.99)
Lydia is a person who appears briefly in the account of St Paul’s second missionary journey. She was a seller of purple cloth – in the 1st Century a luxury item – an apparently insignificant person in life.
But in a longer perspective she can be seen as the first person in Europe who accepted his ‘good news’ and adhered to the new Christian faith.
This book is a novel, or perhaps it might be better to say a narrative, elaborated by Paula Gooder as her second foray into the realm of fiction. In this series she is attempting to wrest a very human figure from the pages of the New Testament and to give her a new life in a way that may appeal more to the reading tastes of today.
Dr Gooder is a distinguished scholar and Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. So this is not strictly speaking a novel in the mere entertainment sense. It is an attempt through the narrative to reveal to a wide audience the insights of modern scholarship in a way most people would not bring themselves to read.
It may also help bring a knowledge and experience of the basic New Testament to those who might not in the ordinary way pick that up either.
Dr Gooder’s first novel was well received and the paperback edition of this, her second will achieve a similar success. For readers who think they might not enjoy such a thing we can only advise, as St Augustine was in a different situation, to “take up the book and read”.