Longman’s Charity

Damaged by an attempted abortion, preyed upon by the violence of his parents' marriage, abused from the age of seven, and shut away in a mental hospital at thirteen, Paul Broadley never ceases to love the landscape he grows up in, which acts as a precursor to his salvation. But there is a serpent in that garden bent on willfully corrupting people–and yet redemption is strewn widely for those able to respond. Longman's Charity is a novel and theological parable about landscape and childhood, sanity and abuse, truth and redemption. Stigmatized and avoided by his peers, Paul suffers deep psychological trauma as he represses memories of abuse, yet there is a passionate joy in his love of the natural world: the hills, the vale, the glorious fecundity of God's creation. When he climbs out of that vale onto Bredon Hill for the first time, he is struck by the realization of the beauty and the joy of God's creation, but also of the evil that infects it. Longman's Charity is an illustration of the Book of the Psalms and the existence portrayed by the psalm writers: as he grows up, redemption comes through realizing the Truth in Christ