Evin's Broken Believer

Description:

Evin's Broken Believer is a debut literary novel by Lucian Ivan Crowe, a Tennessee-based author publishing through Subtle Longing House Publishing. Written in confessional diary form and structured as a theological thriller, the book follows an unnamed narrator originally from Tennessee who is abducted and held as a political prisoner in Iran's notorious Evin Prison — where, stripped of every certainty he ever built his life around, he is forced to confront the man he became. The novel takes its title from the prison itself: the place where his belief, and the man he was, are broken open. The novel sits in the literary lineage of Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Shūsaku Endō, Graham Greene, and Flannery O'Connor, treating faith, doubt, failure, and the slow work of becoming whole as serious subjects worthy of literary craft. The narrator's namelessness is a deliberate inheritance from the confessional tradition — Augustine, Bunyan, Endō's Silence — placing the reader inside the experience of belief and unbelief without the filter of identity. It is a religious novel written for readers exhausted by easy redemption, one that takes belief and unbelief equally seriously and refuses to resolve what cannot be resolved. A 316-page paperback, distributed nationally through IngramSpark and available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and through independent booksellers. Recommended for collections in literary fiction, contemporary religious fiction, theology and the arts, prison literature, and Tennessee authors.

subjects: literary fiction,  religious fiction,  contemporary fiction,  debut novel,  theological fiction,  Christian literary fiction,  confessional novel,  diary novel,  faith and doubt,  prison literature,  Iran,  Evin Prison,  political prisoner,  redemption,  grace,  belief and unbelief,  contemplative fiction,  religious experience,  theology and the arts,  Tennessee authors,  indie literary fiction,  Subtle Longing House Publishing,  Lucian Ivan Crowe

People: Autumn Rain,  Qadim,  Amir,  Immanuel

Places: Tehran (Iran),  Tennessee (USA),  Yerevan (Armenia)

Times: Evin's Broken Believer is set in the present day,  principally inside Iran's Evin Prison,  where the unnamed narrator is held as a political prisoner. Through diary entries written from confinement,  the novel moves fluidly between his present captivity and his remembered life in Tennessee — the people,  the failures,  and the certainties he carried with him into the cell. The setting is at once physical and interior: a real,  geographically specific prison,  and the inward landscape of a man being stripped of every belief he used to defend himself. The reader stays close to the narrator's voice throughout,  experiencing time as he experiences it — fragmented,  recursive,  weighted by memory,  and shadowed by the question of whether he will ever leave.