Colin Duriez

Becoming C. S. Lewis

History & Biography

“A unique coming-of-age biography of C. S. Lewis that stands out in revealing how his early life shaped the future Lewis: body, mind, and soul. It vividly captures the whole person of Lewis—not only an aspect of him but also the variety and depth of his defining features. The result is an eye-opening, important, and rich portrait that benefits from the teeming knowledge and thorough research of the author. It includes the often-neglected, lasting significance of the people who impacted the often-solitary young Lewis, with illuminating flash-forwards to the future Lewis.”

Echoes of Eden

Arts & Literature

“In a clear and attractive style, Jerram Barrs writes with passion about the ‘Echoes of Eden’ in the arts, which are so central to our humanity, whatever our beliefs. Graciously and with wisdom, he picks up a conversation that has already included such Christian thinkers as John Calvin, Dorothy L. Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis. Illustrations that he draws from the fiction of Lewis, Tolkien, J. K. Rowling, the still enormously popular Jane Austen, and others make even more vivid his insightful reflections. Reading his gift of a book is an enriching and inspiring experience not to be missed.”

Schaeffer on the Christian Life

Christian Living

“Francis Schaeffer was small of stature but a giant in his tenacious concern for truth, for God, for people, and for reality. He became convinced that Christian faith was the radical path for our own day, the realistic answer to the hard questions of a modern, troubled world. William Edgar’s compulsively readable study of Francis Schaeffer’s thought is set in the context of his rough-edged life and his brilliantly-inspired work in the L’Abri community he established with his remarkable wife, Edith. L’Abri, perched high on the slopes of a remote alpine valley, drew a motley procession of mainly young travellers from the ends of the earth. Schaeffer’s own, sometimes anguished, quest to communicate the ancient biblical text in a century of unprecedented historical changes attracted and opened doors for a generation of Christians. It also convinced many outside the faith with honest questions (like Bill Edgar himself) to follow the way of Christ. This engaging book captures the fire of Francis Schaeffer’s thought and concerns, and revisits and reinvigorates the still urgent challenge he presented to the church in the modern world.”

Splendour in the Dark

Arts & Literature

“A delightful book that brings new life to a coming-of-age story many years in the writing, published in the 1920s by then-unbeliever C. S. Lewis, who aspired at that time to be a great poet. As a book-length poem, Dymer turned out to be 'a fascinating failure,' as David C. Downing deftly points out in his foreword. For Jerry Root, the main commentator on the poem, its story yields many treasures—'splendour in the dark'—that would reappear in various genres in the future Lewis's prose as he became an engaging writer for scholars and wider readerships. This brilliantly informative book also includes David Downing's enlightening annotations of the complete poem, and other scholars in wide-ranging dialogue with Root that adds a rich dimension to this exposition of Dymer. The coming-of-age story is discovered to reveal much about the development of C. S. Lewis's own life and thought, away from destructive subjectivism to acceptance of iconoclastic shaping by the real: how the central quest of Lewis's writing becomes the capture of the real, as with the elusive experience of Joy, or Sehnsucht. Dymer's story engages in the life-and-death theme that reality is iconoclastic: to be tasted, even if bitter.”

The Completion of C. S. Lewis

History & Biography

“In this third and final book of his entrancing biography, Harry Lee Poe covers an extraordinary continuity of unfolding events and realities—moving from the effects of Lewis’s coming of age to outstanding maturity, marked by ongoing clarity, a gripping imagination, and fresh expression. Poe’s trilogy captures Lewis’s creativity and his seemingly effortless portrayal of the relevance of Christian faith, whether to children and laypeople or scholars and friends. Here Poe’s in-depth and vivid study ranges from the end of World War II to Lewis’s passing. Prior elements of what made the man are fully brought together as concluding elements emerge, such as the grief of losing his wife and deep friend, Joy Davidman, not long before his own death. What Lewis said of his late friend Dorothy L. Sayers also applies well to him: ‘let us thank the Author who invented’ this extraordinary person.”

The Making of C. S. Lewis

History & Biography

“Harry Lee Poe has a remarkable ability to highlight and explore central moments of Lewis’s life in a highly readable way. Not only does his narrative retain an absorbing continuity of unfolding events, but he also shows the significance of the role that Lewis’s friends and family members, including his adoptive mother, played in shaping the journey of his life. J. R. R. Tolkien once remarked to an Oxford student that they would never get to the bottom of their tutor C. S. Lewis, but The Making of C. S. Lewis succeeds in doing so. It is refreshingly accessible as well as deeply knowledgeable, covering all aspects of the complex Lewis, whose learning, storytelling for adults and children, wisdom, and humor are known throughout the world.”

The Most Reluctant Convert

History & Biography

“An excellent and robust idea that has been skillfully and convincingly realized. I very much appreciate the elegant and sparing way that David writes, and was dazzled by the powerful speculative ending to the last chapter.”

The Pilgrim's Regress, Wade Annotated Edition

Fiction

“C. S. Lewis spoke of the ‘needless obscurity’ of this early fiction of ideas. Later he added notes and an explanatory preface for the reader of seventy years ago. Now David C. Downing has gone further and helped to make Lewis’s engaging and classic modern pilgrim’s quest even more accessible for today’s reader. I’ve reread The Pilgrim’s Regress more often than many of Lewis’s writings and am delighted at this new edition.”

The Romantic Rationalist

History & Biography

“A warm-hearted, engaging and thoroughly thought-out appreciation of evangelicalism’s enormous debt to C. S. Lewis that also looks squarely at differences, real and imagined. With well-chosen and varied contributors, it presents a deep understanding and wide reading of Lewis and also reaches toward the secret of Lewis’s profound and health-giving influence on Christianity throughout the world.”