The Last Day » (Unabridged)

James Landis lives in New Hampshire.

I meet Jesus on the day I get home from the war. I’m on the beach, but I don’t know how I got here. My mind is as dark as the night. . . . I spend the whole night on the beach. But when the sun’s faint light begins to bend around the Earth, I see him. . . . There, coming toward me, out of the light, is a man. . . . Behind the man a faint curtain of light rises to the sky out of the ocean. He wears the light like a robe, though I see he’s dressed like me. Jeans and a T-shirt, no shoes. And that he’s older than I am, a lot older, maybe mid-thirties. He walks right toward me. He walks right into my eyes.

So begins the spellbinding story of Warren Harlan Pease, a young U.S. Army sniper freshly returned from the Iraq War to his native New Hampshire. What follows is a page-turning adventure that is also a powerful meditation on religion and war, love and loss.

The Last Day answers questions and asks many more. Armed with a sniper’s rifle and his deeply held faith, Specialist Pease travels across ideological borders and earns an appreciation for his enemy’s culture and for what connects us all as human beings. “War doesn’t test your faith in Jesus,” Warren comes to realize. “It tests your faith in yourself.” Upon returning home, he spends an entire day with Jesus visiting and contemplating his own life with fresh eyes, and a willing heart. He examines his relationship to those he loves, and grapples with the pain he has been carrying inside since the death of his mother when he was just a boy.

This extraordinary work of compassion and healing grace combines the themes of religion, war and poetry in a way that is wholly original, and unforgettable. It will resonate with skeptics and believers, be shared and discussed between friends and among families.

Publishers Weekly

It’s tough to do a guy-meets-Jesus book and not be too pious for some and/or too heretical for others. Landis (Longing), a former editor-in-chief at William Morrow, walks a line somewhere between in this ambitious and lyrical story of a young veteran returning to his New Hampshire home from the Iraq War. Army sniper Warren Pease (think of a famous novel by Tolstoy) meets a blue-jeans clad Jesus (“Call me Ray,” Jesus says) on the beach, and Jesus accompanies Pease through a day of returning to important relationships—his father, his girlfriend, his toddler daughter—while reflecting on his dead mother and other past events. There’s lots of gentle humor—Jesus likes burgers and of course he knows everything, including miscellaneous facts about the natural world. Much grimmer, and darker, are episodes set in Iraq of intense violence; they also seem somewhat stagier next to the relative naturalism of the New Hampshire setting, Ray’s supernaturalism notwithstanding. Being about Christ doesn’t automatically make it an edifying Christian novel, and it won’t sit well with some conservative religious readers. But it’s worth a dozen Shacks. (Sept.)