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The Friday Gospels

The Friday Gospels is a British addition to a US strand of literature that sets out to explore the following questions: What is Mormon fiction? Would it be possible for a non-Mormon to write this and why would s/he want to? In form it is a circadian novel that responds to Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Ali Smith’s The Accidental. Through five narrative voices, distinct but harmonious, (the working model for this was the Mormon Tabernacle Choir) Jenn Ashworth explores ideas around Mormon culture (especially the moral uses of fiction), belonging, sacrifice, scape-goating and religion. As well as the Choir, the novel's form is also a way to explore Latter Day Saint theologies related to the family unit. Through a set of unreliable narrative voices The Friday Gospels explores the persistence of doubt in religious life and doubt’s primary place in the creative processes of reading and writing.

Following publication, Ashworth was interviewed on BBC Breakfast and BBC Radio 4's “Front Row” and she has been invited to write opinion pieces for The Daily Mail, The Sunday Express and Grazia. The book received positive reviews from all the main national broadsheets (The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, The Independent on Sunday, The Telegraph). The novel will be the subject of an essay length review on the phenomenon of British Mormon fiction in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought this year. Several foreign language rights deals are pending and the book is also currently being adapted for television by ITV studios for Channel 4.