The work was first published in the United Kingdom on October 6, 2014, and concerns an English pastor who is sent to the planet of Oasis to teach its reclusive native inhabitants about Christianity.

It is gradually revealed that rather than being a missionary in a different country, he has been hired by USIC, a private American corporation, to preach to the population of a distant planet, Oasis.

Peter believes he has been poisoned, but nevertheless he goes back to USIC, where he is treated for his wounds and receives a message from Bea telling him that there is no God.

[1] Critical reception for The Book of Strange New Things has been mostly positive, and the work has received praise from io9, the New York Times, and The Independent.

[2][3][4] The Guardian praised the work for being "astonishing and deeply affecting" and wrote, "This is a big novel – partly because it has to construct and explain its unhomely setting, partly because it has such a lot of religious, linguistic, philosophical and political freight to deliver – but the reader is pulled through it at some pace by the gothic sense of anxiety that pervades and taints every element.

"[5] NPR was more mixed in their review, commenting that as a work of science fiction the book was overly familiar and compared it unfavorably to A Canticle for Leibowitz while also stating that Faber "tells a beautifully human story of love, loss, faith and the sometimes uncrossable distances between people.