The Nimbus

By Robert P. Baird

Named a best book of the year by The New Yorker and The Washington Post

A riveting debut novel about a child whose literal enlightenment sets the stage for an exuberant tragicomedy of marriage, religion, and parenthood

On an otherwise ordinary fall day on a university campus in Chicago, the toddler son of an ambitious divinity school professor named Adrian Bennett mysteriously starts to glow. The nimbus, as the strange, soft light comes to be known, offers no clues to its origin and frustrates every attempt at rational explanation.

Though it appears only intermittently, and not to everyone, the nimbus quickly upends the lives of all those who encounter it, including Paul Harkin, Adrian's broke and feckless graduate student, who likes being a graduate student a little too much for his own good; Renata Bennett, Adrian's omnicompetent wife, who can't see the otherworldly glow; and Warren Kayita, a down-on-his-luck librarian and aging divinity school alumnus on the run from a violent criminal. As news about the nimbus spreads around the university and beyond, Adrian, Paul, Renata, and Warren are set on a collision course that will threaten their lives and put their deepest convictions to the test.

At once a rollicking intellectual satire, a searing portrait of a family in crisis, and a thrilling metaphysical page-turner, The Nimbus offers a comic and profound examination of the persistence of spiritual belief in a secular age and humanity's timeless search for meaning.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1250392632
• ISBN13: 9781250392633
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
• Length: 352 Pages