The Transmigration of Timothy Archer(1982)

Philip K. Dick

The stakes in this book are hope and sanity. Dick wins. It is time and past time that reviewers and critics take notice of this elusive and imcomparable artist. - Ursula Le Guin

Bishop Timothy Archer is California's most charismatic church leader, a single-minded seeker after the truth prepared to change or even abandon the most sacred tenets of Christian faith... prepared to accept that Christ's most famous sayings were recorded two centuries before He lived, prepared to see Christianity as a Middle East mushroom cult, and prepared to be put on trial as a heretic.

In his majestic wake bob the flotsam and jetsam of utterly wrecked lives. Death stalks his closest relatives - his son Jeff, his mistress Kirsten - but Timothy Archer will let nothing stand in the way of his quest...

One of the original practitioners writing any kind of fiction, Philip K. Dick made most of the European avant-garde seem navel-gazers in a cul-de-sac - Sunday Times

A fine book... assured, well-crafted and moving... like all of Dick's books, not a little weird - The Scotsman

Cover illustration: George Underwood