#RivetingReviews: Max Easterman reviews HOLY F*CK by Joseph Incardona, translated by Sam Taylor

Joseph Incardona is a Swiss author, born in Italy and writing in French. He’s produced not only fifteen successful novels, but also scripts for theatre and cinema. Several of his books are crime thrillers, which focus on both the psychology and topical issues of the criminal world; he has also written a series of autobiographical novels about his experiences as an Italian immigrant in Switzerland. His books have been translated into languages as diverse as German and Georgian, but this is the first to appear in English, perfectly rendered by Sam Taylor.

Holy F*ck, which shifts back and forth between the outrageously satirical and the chillingly scary, is set in the other Georgia, in the American south, and its title in French Stella et l’Amérique gives the reader no clue as to its content. Holy F*ck is more graphic, revealing and delightfully so! Stella Thibodeaux is nineteen, not exactly beautiful, nor that clever either … but very desirable – “the quantification of desire” – and men flock to her RV, her recreational vehicle, which doubles as her home and her business centre, where, by whatever blessed mechanism, God-given or otherwise, she finds she can cure them of incurable diseases, or at least, diseases that in America are too expensive for their sufferers to be able to pay for a cure.

Stella works the fairgrounds and amusement parks of southern Georgia, where the queues at her RV are becoming legendary. Her fame catches the eyes and ears of the Catholic Church, in the person of Father Brown, who alerts the Vatican, which senses a golden opportunity to polish its fading image. A latter-day saint, a miracle-worker, an icon and a young and attractive one at that. But – and it’s big “but” – there’s a catch: Stella can only cure her disease-ridden clients by having sex with them. Which is what she does for a living, because she’s a prostitute.

This is the Church’s Gordian Knot, an apparently insoluble problem that can only be resolved by force majeure: Rome wants a living saint – but a saint who lives a life of sin, sex and money? The solution is a brilliant exposition of the ethical inconsistencies and moral hypocrisies of the Church: to be a saint, Stella must die. She must die young, be martyred, because martyrdom will absolve her of all her sins and elevate her sex-induced cures to untarnished, immaculate miracles. And Rome has its agents, violent but discreet, who will make this happen and allow the Vatican ship of state to sail on unsullied into the sunset … What follows is a priceless romp with a cast of priceless characters, not all of whom survive the roller-coaster of events, as the Vatican’s assassins, the Bronski Twins, pursue Stella through the oppressive heat of Georgia’s summer, hell bent on cleaning up her image by sanctifying her dead body.

Joseph Incardona is a magnificent writer, who deploys an array of rhetorical devices to enliven his prose and keep us longing for more. At one point, as one of the Bronskis bemoans having to play the waiting game, doing nothing, having reached a dead end in the search for Stella, his brother philosophises: “A classic example of Heidegger’s Dasein: among all possibilities, we remain attached to what is tangible. In perpetual transition between the past and the future.” His twin’s response is a bubble-bursting harrumph worthy of Heine: “I’m fucking sick of this.” Incardona himself becomes part of the action at another juncture: describing the state of one of the Bronskis’ victims, he remarks: “ … there is infinite grace in the simple fact of a desperately vulnerable and fragile woman being helped to drink by a man; it is for a moment like this that I was born an Aquarius …it is for a moment like this that I became a writer.”

The text is infused with aphorisms of truly Wodehousean splendour: Meredith “had … a voice like gravel being poured into a plastic jug.” “Old age is like a spring roll: the tender past wrapped in the skin’s crust.” At times, they read like catechisms, though not necessarily ones the Church would subscribe to: “Grace touches only the purest and most corrupt of souls. There are no half measures where God is concerned. He vomits upon the lukewarm.” And then there’s the Pope, Simon II (the like of which we have yet to see, but who knows?), who’s an ardent fan of the Vatican women’s soccer team “ … in their fitted yellow jerseys … their determination, their youth … their tensed thigh muscles under those tight white shorts gave him back his faith in humanity.” But be warned: beneath this sparkling and satirical veneer, there lurks something very nasty indeed, an undercurrent of double-speak and pure malice, which will have you on the edge of your seat. For me this is one of the best reads of 2026.

Reviewed by Max Easterman

HOLY F*CK

Written by Joseph Incardona

Translated from the French by Sam Taylor

Published by Bitter Lemon Press (April 2026)

March 2026 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

Max Easterman spent thirty-five years as a BBC broadcaster. He was a lecturer in journalism for seventeen years at Huddersfield University and is today a translator, media trainer with Sounds Right, jazz musician and reviewer.

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