Life and Faith: Rewriting Jesus

Life and Faith speaks to author Peter McKinnon about his new book, The Songs of Jesse Adams.

In September 2013, The Guardian declared that “Jesus is having a moment in literary fiction”. From Dickens to Norman Mailer, as well as a more recent crop of novelists, writers have been intrigued by the story of Jesus and have set out to explore its limits and possibilities in fictional form. Australian author Peter McKinnon asked himself the question: what would the character of Jesus look like in 1960s Australia instead of 1st-century Palestine? The result, The Songs of Jesse Adams, pushes the boundaries of our assumptions about Jesus with its reimagining of his life amidst the social, political, and musical tumult of the ‘60s.