Winner of the 2025 Steven G. Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature, an annual award given to a first-time, first-generation immigrant author, The Church of Masterywill be published by Restless Books in 2027.
Set at the dawn of World War II, The Church of Mastery follows a boy named William (Billy Boy) Jones as he tries to find his footing on a small Caribbean island where mangos grow and other boys pelt the back of his head with spitballs. William has discovered poetry, and must learn how to fight back and run fast. Eventually, he migrates to America. Searching for what he calls “the perfect poem” amid romantic loss and spiritual doubt, he finds himself traveling with a group of like-minded artists in the Deep South during the height of segregation.
Is it possible to build a life around beauty when the world feels primarily interested in institution and survival, capitalism and compromise?
While Stephen’s work on the novel was inspired by the work of Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, James Baldwin, and Marilynne Robinson, it also emerges from his struggle to protect the sacred interior self in the face of empire, market, and institution. In a moment when immigrant literature is often expected to perform trauma or assimilation, the novel insists on a subtler revolution: the sovereignty of the inner life, the glories of transcendence.
Advanced Praise
“In dazzling prose that moves like a sea of poetry, Stephen Narain in his book The Church of Mastery presents the flayed and rigorous survival of a poet’s heart. The protagonist, William Jones, born in a fictitious Caribbean nation, wades through the weight of colonial education that does not prepare him adequately for his migration to the United States. On the outside of social circles, national identities, and family, I can’t help but see so much of the post-colonial Guyanese condition illuminated: always realization and deferred understanding until the protagonist stands firmly in ‘foreign,’ where there is no simple categorization of people or the deepness of the oceans they wade into remembering their wholeness. I love this Guyanese-American book!”
—Rajiv Mohabir, Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir
“Stephen Narain’s wise and magisterial first novel is at once a story of home and migration, of love and loss, but above all it is a novel fully vested in the singular power of language and beauty to transform our world.”
—Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
“From the first lines it’s evident that this is a new voice, alive with the exuberance of language and a rhythm as natural and verdant as the scenes it describes. Only an immigrant novel could cover so much ground—here, the story of one young man’s determination to remain true to the life he wants, to a poetry only he can hear, unfolds into an improbable road trip through history and time, segregation and the Deep South, God and music, literature and irreverence, with a narrator that surprises at every turn.”
—Ilan Stavans, Publisher, Restless Books and Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture, Amherst College