He was on fire. Adrian’s son was on fire. That, at any rate, was what it looked like...
On an otherwise ordinary fall day on a university campus in Chicago, the toddler son of an ambitious divinity-school professor 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 otherworldly glow quickly upends the lives of all those who encounter it.
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.
The Nimbus will be published by Holt on June 10, 2025. You can—you should!—preorder a copy at your local bookstore or any of these fine retailers:
Baird is brilliant, and so is his remarkable novel about faith, family, and the life of the mind. Read this wonderful book. You’ll be glad to own it.
I think that there are miracles in the world, but realistic novels don’t usually tackle them. Baird’s intelligence, compassion and humor illuminate this astonishingly original debut, which somehow manages to ask hard questions about how to live while also being enormously fun to read.
Robert P. Baird has written a novel of remarkable breadth, one that ponders both the big mysteries (God, miracles) and the small ones (petty graduate school advisers). The Nimbus is a revelation, a book that explores our deep longing for something extraordinary in an otherwise ordinary world.
A big-hearted novel about the biggest questions—marriage, religion, parenthood, meaning. The Nimbus is comic and profound, a novel that practically glows. Robert P. Baird is a huge talent.
