The Book of the People: How to Read the Bible review – not your standard academic tome

AN Wilson’s tribute to the Bible – and to a late acquaintance – is an erudite pleasure but suffers from a muddled narrative

This is a two-for-the-price-of-one book. The real prize within its covers is an erudite, elegant and quietly impassioned plea from AN Wilson for us all, believers or not, to read the Bible more. The modern generation is missing out, he says, on the magnificence of its prose, the power of the stories it tells, and its extraordinary track record for inspiring the best and worst of human endeavours.

But included in there, too, is a distracting, half-formed eulogy to a shadowy would-be biblical scholar, a “sad gypsy”, more an acquaintance than a friend of Wilson’s, referred to only as “L”, who led an unhappy life and died prematurely and unfulfilled.

Related: Once upon a life: AN Wilson

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