A Year of Grace

A Year of Grace is a 1950 anthology compiled by Victor Gollancz, consisting of passages (and some pieces of music) concerning religious and spiritual life, taken from a variety of different sources.

The sources include the writings of a number of rabbis, European and American philosophers, psychologists, poets and theologians, as well as some Biblical scripture.

Gollancz started reading for the book (which he also used in From Darkness to Light) over the winter of 1943, when recovering from a nervous breakdown he had had in June of that year, and worked on it intermittently until it was published.

He focused on the twin dangers of anti-religious humanism, which regarded mankind as self-sufficient, and anti-humanistic religion, which gave a view of man as a "wretched, powerless, worthless sinner, miserable slave of a God conceived of as capricious and omnipotent tyrant".

[7] Author Colin Wilson writes that he was inspired to send his book The Outsider to Gollancz after finding a copy of A Year of Grace in a second-hand bookshop, believing that he had found a sympathetic publisher.

Many of Gollancz's friends gave positive comments, including George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, Lettice Cooper, Stafford Cripps, Daphne Du Maurier and Dean Inge.

[10] On the BBC Radio programme Desert Island Discs, the anthology was chosen as the castaway's book by both Victor Gollancz, in 1961, and travel writer Colin Thubron in 1989.