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.
Told in shifting perspectives, The Nimbus is as much a campus novel as it is a philosophical one. It follows Adrian, a professor at the Divinity School, who believes he is witnessing the miraculous: his young son Luca is glowing. Luca’s light is visible to others, including Paul Harkin, Adrian’s adrift graduate mentee, and Warren Kayita, a once rising star in the theology program turned librarian. But Adrian’s wife, Renata, sees nothing. This gap in perception—belief versus skepticism, seen versus unseen—becomes the novel’s animating tension. As word of the nimbus spreads across campus, it becomes the subject of fascination and speculation, eventually forcing a clash between morality and self-preservation.
Baird, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School, writes with the command and precision of a seasoned editor—experience he’s accumulated at publications like The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine. 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.
Maybe the most impressive part of The Nimbus is Baird’s refusal to resolve its central mystery: why does Luca glow, and why can only some people see it? Is the nimbus real or just a shared delusion? A hoax or a miracle? Baird does not deliver easy answers, nor imply simplistic morals. Instead, he lets uncertainty linger, particularly through the novel’s unusual preface.
Writing as himself, Baird tells the reader about a professor he had in college who started every class by announcing that “every story starts with a lie.” Baird ends his preface with an unorthodox note of caution: “But since you’ll have every reason to distrust what follows—I still hardly believe half of it myself—let me confess, here at the outset, that I have taken certain liberties with the truth,” he writes. “Though I have tried to accurately record the most unbelievable of the events that I witnessed, I have changed some names and scrambled some personal characteristics in recounting their context: to protect the innocent, yes, but also to protect myself, who am far from innocent.”
As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear this preface strikes the perfect tone for what follows: a novel that questions the very nature of truth and faith. In refusing to decide for the reader, Baird elicits the consideration of a range of ideas not just about religion and belief, but also about institutional disillusionment, the fragility of intimate relationships, and the human desire to construct meaning in the face of the inexplicable. 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.
FICTION
The Nimbus
by Robert P. Baird
Henry Holt and Co.
Published June 10, 2025
