Secular humanism has triumphed. Everything the late Victorians and Edwardians believed would bring human happiness has been achieved: technology has made it so no one needs to work for a living, the social sciences ensure a smooth-running social order, and in the name of tolerance, religious beliefs have been uprooted and eliminated except for a single holdout: a largely discredited and rapidly shrinking Catholic Church. Yet people are unhappy.
What has been created is a sterile world of crass materialism, a world without spiritual dimension, a world where people daily choose legalized euthanasia over the emptiness of existence. Out of this culture of despair, there arises a charismatic leader: Julian Felsenburgh. Soon the masses are in Felsenburgh’s thrall and he becomes leader of the world. But in their eagerness for change, have the citizens of the world embraced the Antichrist and hastened the end of days?
Father Percy Franklin remains a bastion of stability, even as the Catholic Church disintegrates around him. Finally outlawed and driven underground, it is only this small and shrinking Church that stands against the “Lord of the World.”
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“Benson’s novel-nightmare…is coming true before our very eyes.”
— Joseph Pearce, director of the Center for Faith and Culture, Aquinas College, Nashville
“Every reader will find delight.”
— New York Times“I advise you to read it.”
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Robert Hugh Benson (1871–1914) was ordained as an Anglican priest by his father, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Benson later joined the Church of Rome and was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1904. He continued his writing career in addition to his ministry, publishing several ghost and horror stories. The dystopian novel Lord of the World is his best-known work.
Simon Vance (a.k.a. Robert Whitfield) is an award-winning actor and narrator. He has earned more than fifty Earphones Awards and won the prestigious Audie Award for best narration thirteen times. He was named Booklist’s very first Voice of Choice in 2008 and has been named an AudioFile Golden Voice as well as an AudioFile Best Voice of 2009. He has narrated more than eight hundred audiobooks over almost thirty years, beginning when he was a radio newsreader for the BBC in London. He is also an actor who has appeared on both stage and television.