Nailing Down the Saint

Hollywood, fatherhood, levitation. This smart, funny, thought-provoking novel is full of surprises. Duncan Blake is a Kiwi filmmaker whose move to LA has not gone to plan. After a series of setbacks, he s working at a chain restaurant, his marriage is on shaky ground after a porn-related faux pas and his son won t stop watching Aladdin. When Duncan gets the chance to scout locations for a feted director s biopic of Saint Joseph of Copertino, it s the lifeline he s been searching for. But in Italy, in the footsteps of the seventeenth-century levitator, he must confront miracles, madness and the realities of modern movie making. A novel about the pursuit of dreams, the moral calculus this entails, and the possibility that the rational, materialist worldview isn t all it s cracked up to be.