Evin's Broken Believer
Evin's Broken Believer is a debut literary novel by Lucian Ivan Crowe, a Tennessee-based author publishing through Subtle Longing House Publishing. Written in confessional diary form and structured as a theological thriller, the book follows an unnamed narrator originally from Tennessee who is abducted and held as a political prisoner in Iran's notorious Evin Prison — where, stripped of every certainty he ever built his life around, he is forced to confront the man he became. The novel takes its title from the prison itself: the place where his belief, and the man he was, are broken open. The novel sits in the literary lineage of Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Shūsaku Endō, Graham Greene, and Flannery O'Connor, treating faith, doubt, failure, and the slow work of becoming whole as serious subjects worthy of literary craft. The narrator's namelessness is a deliberate inheritance from the confessional tradition — Augustine, Bunyan, Endō's Silence — placing the reader inside the experience of belief and unbelief without the filter of identity. It is a religious novel written for readers exhausted by easy redemption, one that takes belief and unbelief equally seriously and refuses to resolve what cannot be resolved. A 316-page paperback, distributed nationally through IngramSpark and available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and through independent booksellers. Recommended for collections in literary fiction, contemporary religious fiction, theology and the arts, prison literature, and Tennessee authors.