Set in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the novel tells the semi-fictionalised life story of the medieval Roman Catholic saint, Godric of Finchale.

Godric of Finchale is joined at his hermitage on the banks of the River Wear by Reginald, a monk sent by the abbot of Rievaulx Abbey with instructions to record the aging saint’s biography.

The arrival of the enthusiastic young monk plunges Godric back into his past, and he unflinchingly narrates the ribald tale of his own history, which is carefully edited by Reginald and set down in restrained and laudatory prose more befitting of the life of a saint.

Having survived a near drowning in the sea at a young age, Godric leaves home for a life of petty crime – selling counterfeit relics and the ostensibly holy hair of nuns.

Following a dreamlike encounter on the Island of Farne with an apparition who identifies himself as Saint Cuthbert, Godric appears set to spend his life seeking God.

The two embark upon a life of crime and villainy aboard their boat, the Saint Espirit, where they hatch a series of schemes to defraud pilgrims journeying to the Holy Land and commit acts of piracy, all the while hoarding their growing stockpile of treasure.

After a number of years spent in the service of Ranulph Flambard, Bishop of Durham, Godric espies a likely spot for a hermitage on the banks of the River Wear.

He had not considered himself a saint at all and for that reason balked at giving his blessing to the excessively reverent biography that a contemporary monk called Reginald of Durham was writing about him.

Some of the historical themes Buechner depicts in the book include blood libels, pilgrimage, Christian asceticism, hagiography, traveling court culture, and Norman and Saxon relations.

From the major news organs to book review pages all across the country, readers were remarkably effusive in their acclaim, and all of them mentioned the language as part of the triumph.

[7]The Wall Street Journal review of Godric certainly focused in on the author’s prose style, concluding that, 'With a poet’s sensibility and a high, reverent fancy, Mr. Buechner paints a memorable portrait.

'[8] Likewise, the reviewer for Booklist referred to the ‘Chaucerian exuberance’[9] of the novel, while Peter Lewis declared it to be a ‘picaresqe narrative’, and a ‘stylistic tour de force’, formed out of language that is ‘neither ancient nor modern but a bit of both cleverly combined.’[10] Writing for Times Literary Supplement, Lewis offers further comment on the protagonist of the novel, writing that: ‘In the extraordinary figure of Godric, both stubborn outsider and true child of God, both worldly and unworldly, Buechner has found an ideal means of exploring the nature of spirituality’.

Concerning the novel itself, the reviewer added: ']All on his own, Mr. Buechner has managed to reinvent projects of self-purification and of faith as piquant matter for contemporary fiction [in a book] notable for literary finish'.