What We’re Reading This Spring

The Destroyers

by Christopher Bollen

Broke and fleeing scandal, a now fatherless Ian Bledsoe escapes to the Greek island of Patmos, where his friend Charlie offers him a lifeline — a high-level job in his yachting business — and introduces him to a cluster of extravagant friends who are drawn to Charlie’s wealth and charisma. The morning after a tense dinner party, Charlie is nowhere to be found. Ian makes it his mission to find his friend but discovers that the island’s beauty is hiding something sinister. Bollen has created a tense literary thriller that examines what extreme wealth and familial expectations can drive people to do.

God’s Smuggler

by Andrew van der Bijl

First published in English in 1967, God’s Smuggler is the real-life story of how Dutch missionary Andrew van der Bijl smuggled Bibles behind the Iron Curtain. Affectionately nicknamed “Brother Andrew,” he took on the yeoman’s task of sneaking himself and his Bibles into Soviet Bloc countries … and ultimately into the heart of Russia. The account details many of the challenges he and his team faced, from circumventing border security to translating the Bibles into each country’s native language. His tale serves as a stark reminder of the importance of our religious freedoms and that true faith calls us to action.

The Screwtape Letters

by C.S. Lewis

In 1942’s The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis — more well-known these days for his Narnia books — imagines a series of letters written by an experienced demon, Screwtape, to his young protegé and nephew Wormwood. Screwtape’s ultimate goal: To teach Wormwood how to manipulate human beings — by taking advantage of human weaknesses like selfishness and a lack of self-awareness — into damning their own souls to eternal hell. Through this odd epistolary, Lewis explores themes of benevolence, kindness, and forgiveness and contrasts them with their importance relative to man’s ideas of sin and Satan, as relevant today as it was more than 80 years ago.

This article is featured in the May/June 2025 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.