The Nimbus is out now!

It's here! I'm thrilled to announce that today is the publication date for The Nimbus, my debut novel. The book is available as a hardcover, ebook, and audiobook, and you can order from your favorite independent bookstore, from Bookshop.org, from Amazon, from Barnes & Noble, and, well, you get the idea…

Early reviews of the book have been encouraging: Publishers Weekly called it "a caustic send-up of the campus novel… [that] packs a stinging punch" and Booklist says it's "intriguing, entertaining, and often searing in its critiques of academia" as well as being "a fascinating portrait of a family pulled apart by ambition and unexpected events."

I was particularly delighted today to read this rave, from the Chicago Review of Books (which earlier put The Nimbus on its list of June must-reads). Tempting as it is to quote the whole thing, I'll just quote a couple of particularly happy-making sentences, which give a good flavor of the book:

If you let the pervasiveness of religion in Robert P. Baird’s debut novel, The Nimbus, scare you away, you’re sure to miss out. Sure, this novel is steeped in theology. It’s set at a Divinity School at a university on the South Side of Chicago, it’s peppered with brief detours into arcane religious thought and figures like Soame Jenyns and John of Garland, and it centers a toddler who begins emitting a soft, unexplained haloed glow. But The Nimbus is far from a doctrinal slog.

And:

Although Baird brings an obvious intellectual heft and stylistic finesse to this theological novel, it’s never didactic. He treats religion and belief seriously, but never sanctimoniously. And it’s clear Baird knows his subjects well enough to satirize them without navel-gazing: the self-seriousness of graduate students, the performative grievance of white men in academia, and the glaring gender imbalance of labor that endures even in contemporary parenthood.

And:

To focus on the novel’s exploration of weighty topics, though, belies how fun and funny The Nimbus can be at times. Alongside references to Nietzsche and the fracturing of a marriage, it features a small-time mafioso chasing a character over a debt, skewers the indignities of modern parenthood, and delivers witty asides, like a felicitous description of someone as “handsome, in a San Diego sort of way.” In his smart, smooth debut, Baird delivers a tragicomedy that examines the nature of belief—religious, intellectual, and familial—and the limits of human perception.

Read the whole thing here.