What might a notion of 'sainthood' look like, radically purged of any spirit of propagandist church ideology? In Sublime Virtue, theologian Andrew Shanks demonstrates a vibrant new approach to investigating this question by analysing representations of sainthood in the work of twelve novelists – a 'secular canon', divested of the unhelpful trappings of institutional religious culture and tradition. The book explores virtues of sainthood as presented in the works of George Eliot, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikos Kazantzakis, Yiyun Li, Colson Whitehead, André Schwarz-Bart, Georges Bernanos, Marilynne Robinson, Morris West, Graham Greene, Shusaku Endo and Ford Madox Ford.