Nominated for Gmund Award 2021, for excellence in book design & print

You’re not likely to encounter another book like this in a hurry. Brilliantly (and wittily) weaving together art history, psychology and theology, it invites us to think about imagination and truth, presence and absence, and the way in which human beings manage to avoid noticing what is significant – but not quite successfully enough to make them comfortable.
Rowan Williams

As two people quietly discuss Bernhard Strigel’s paintings of the guardians at the tomb, their voices blend and clash with the panicked voices of the guards themselves. A stunning short novel.
Philip Terry

Given Griffiths’s career as a librettist and musicologist, a distinctly Da Ponte-ish symmetry between “high” and “low” voices and a certain exactitude of pacing and weight, it is tempting to postulate music as a suggestive absence in the book, a kind of dark matter that might fill and charge the spaces between and alongside the words.
Keith Miller, The TLS

Paul Griffiths movingly explores the primary need for attentiveness in our lives, how impossible that is for us to maintain and how art can help us grasp the contradiction… rich grounds for reflection.
Gabriel Josipovici, The TLS

This is a layered book weaved on that threshold between faith and doubt. At the same time, it manages to be humorous, gripping, and energetic.
Nathan Munday, Wales Arts Review

There is no doubt that this is in a different league. Drop the Booker book you’re reading and read this instead.
Paul Fulcher