A Perfectly Good Man by Patrick Gale

This book represents the unpacking of a character, Father Barnaby Johnson. It begins as he witnesses the suicide of one of his parishioners, and helps him through the process with a prayer. Father Barnaby is a good man, but flawed, and struggling like all human beings. He is married to Dorothy aka Dot, and he has two children, Jim aka Phuc and Carrie. This family has to deal with all the things that other families deal with, but there is a sort of delicacy and compassion in the way Gale writes about the issues. Patrick Gale is great on story and inventive in his retelling: the book is a collection of chapters written from the point of view of different characters and at different ages. Gradually, ever so gradually, the story unfolds as it does in real life, with revelations making sense of things you had discovered earlier and changing their meanings.