In Eoghan Walls’s THE GOSPEL OF ORLA (236 pp., Seven Stories, paperback, $16.95), the flinty 14-year-old protagonist runs away from home and finds God — in the form of a “mad hairy” guy wrapped in a blanket who steals her bike. Enraged and afraid, she pulls a pocketknife and demands his name.
“Jesus?” she asks, when he tells her. “Jesus bloody Jesus like the Jesus Jesus?” He nods.
Her bike gone, Orla must return home to her widowed father and toddler sister in the North England village of Glasson Dock. But she’s determined to hatch a new plan. It’s unfair that her grieving dad gets to do what he wants, which is drink; what Orla wants is to steal and skip class and get out of there. When Jesus returns her bike, she shows him how to use an iPhone — he pokes and scrolls, transfixed — and it turns out he’s the real deal: a genuine miracle-worker who raises her cat from the dead. She sees possibility. She persuades him to run off to Ireland with her and try to resurrect her mom.
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