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NUNC!
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Expected 21 Jul 26Jerusalem is ruled by rosemary-scented King Herod. By the bougainvillea in Deuteronomy Square, Reuben's tea stall keeps customers sweet with lemon koloochehs. Onesimus the greengrocer piles his polished pears and pineapples in ziggurats, blind harpist Tabitha captivates bachelor Pharisees, Roman sentries doze and the widower Simeon, beset by gout and befriended by a dog called Shlomo, watches the passing promenade. By day Simeon dodges bossy superintendent Kedar. By starlit night he contemplates lost loves and the visits of a bad-tempered angel.
Quentin Letts's delightful tales bring first-century Jerusalem to quirky life and show how the prophet Simeon, whose Nunc Dimittis became one of the great canticles of Christendom, can help an ailing twenty-first-century Englishman come to terms with his fate.
Nunc! is a gracious yet beautifully navigated meditation on life, love and death.
Quentin Letts's delightful tales bring first-century Jerusalem to quirky life and show how the prophet Simeon, whose Nunc Dimittis became one of the great canticles of Christendom, can help an ailing twenty-first-century Englishman come to terms with his fate.
Nunc! is a gracious yet beautifully navigated meditation on life, love and death.
224 pages, Paperback
First published April 3, 2025
3 people are currently reading
13 people want to read
About the author
Quentin Letts
14 books12 followersQuentin Letts is a British journalist and theatre critic, writing for The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, The Oldie and New Statesman, and previously for The Times.
He was later educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College, Bellarmine College, Kentucky (now Bellarmine University), Trinity College, Dublin where he edited a number of publications, including the satirical Piranha, and studied Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1982–86) at Jesus College, Cambridge, taking a Diploma in Classical Archaeology.
Letts has written for a number of British newspapers since beginning his journalistic career in 1987. His first post was with the Peterborough gossip column in the Daily Telegraph. For a time in the mid-1990s he was New York correspondent for The Times. He is the person behind the Daily Mail's Clement Crabbe column and is also the paper's theatre critic and political sketchwriter. He lists his hobbies in Who's Who as "gossip" and "character defenestration".
His columns have been described as "attempts at faintly homophobic humour" in The Guardian, which accused him of being "busy guarding what children should and shouldn't see in the theatre". He has also been accused of misogyny over an attack on Harriet Harman.
Letts presented an edition of the BBC current affairs programme Panorama broadcast on April 20, 2009. The programme dealt with the growing criticism of the influence of health and safety on various aspects of British life.
Letts has written three books, the bestselling 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain, Bog-Standard Britain, and Letts Rip! all with his UK publisher Constable & Robinson. In Bog Standard Britain he attacks what he sees as Britain's culture of mediocrity, where political correctness has, in his words "crushed the individualism from our nation of once indignant eccentrics". 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain has sold around 45,000 copies and was reviewed in The Spectator as "an angry book, beautifully written". In a published extract, he argued that 1970s feminist writer Germaine Greer may, by asserting female sexuality, have given rise to the modern phenomenon of "ladettes" and that this encouraged men to behave badly to women, thus doing the cause of equality a disservice.
He was later educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College, Bellarmine College, Kentucky (now Bellarmine University), Trinity College, Dublin where he edited a number of publications, including the satirical Piranha, and studied Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1982–86) at Jesus College, Cambridge, taking a Diploma in Classical Archaeology.
Letts has written for a number of British newspapers since beginning his journalistic career in 1987. His first post was with the Peterborough gossip column in the Daily Telegraph. For a time in the mid-1990s he was New York correspondent for The Times. He is the person behind the Daily Mail's Clement Crabbe column and is also the paper's theatre critic and political sketchwriter. He lists his hobbies in Who's Who as "gossip" and "character defenestration".
His columns have been described as "attempts at faintly homophobic humour" in The Guardian, which accused him of being "busy guarding what children should and shouldn't see in the theatre". He has also been accused of misogyny over an attack on Harriet Harman.
Letts presented an edition of the BBC current affairs programme Panorama broadcast on April 20, 2009. The programme dealt with the growing criticism of the influence of health and safety on various aspects of British life.
Letts has written three books, the bestselling 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain, Bog-Standard Britain, and Letts Rip! all with his UK publisher Constable & Robinson. In Bog Standard Britain he attacks what he sees as Britain's culture of mediocrity, where political correctness has, in his words "crushed the individualism from our nation of once indignant eccentrics". 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain has sold around 45,000 copies and was reviewed in The Spectator as "an angry book, beautifully written". In a published extract, he argued that 1970s feminist writer Germaine Greer may, by asserting female sexuality, have given rise to the modern phenomenon of "ladettes" and that this encouraged men to behave badly to women, thus doing the cause of equality a disservice.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 30, 2025
This is a fictionalised retelling of ‘Nunc Dimittis’, ten verses in Luke’s Gospel about the elderly prophet Simeon who waited for the baby Jesus in the Temple. After declaring ‘mine eyes have seen thy salvation’, he can finally die in peace.
2000 years ago, in Jerusalem, old Simeon’s wheelchair collides with a rubbish heap, providing entertainment for the occupants of Deuteronomy Square.
It’s not plot-driven. Instead, we have a series of short stories, incidents in the lives of the inhabitants of the square, as Benjamin’s mule-cart takes us from place to place. The tone is not so much humorous as affectionate. The bits about Jesus are refreshingly devoid of the usual obligatory reverence (the magi following the star are ‘three blundering eejits’; the hiding of Joseph and Mary from Herod’s persecution is almost slapstick).
I get the impression journalist-turned-novelist Quentin Letts, let off the leash from journalistic style constraints, is now free to use puns, emotive dialogue, juicy adjectives, colourful description, characterisation. The result is a flowering of creative expression. The characters are quirky and delicious. The settings are colourful, illuminated by almond blossoms, pistachio trees and bougainvillea. Artisans sell their aromatic wares, and merchants ply their trade.
The blend of modern anachronisms and ancient Palestine is cute (‘Thanks, Mum, said Caleb in the voice teenagers have used since Noah’s flood’). We’re tantalised by first century intimacies (the ‘different types of Pharisee’; the problem of cleaning the Holy of Holies—‘when the high priest enters, you don’t want him smothered by cobwebs. The dust might set off his allergy’) and glimpses of people we will meet in the Gospels (that little boy next to Aretas’ verandah will grow up to crucify Jesus).
Would also suit a YA readership. Non-Christians will love it, too.
An adorable book, 6 stars, a real pleasure to read.
This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.
2000 years ago, in Jerusalem, old Simeon’s wheelchair collides with a rubbish heap, providing entertainment for the occupants of Deuteronomy Square.
It’s not plot-driven. Instead, we have a series of short stories, incidents in the lives of the inhabitants of the square, as Benjamin’s mule-cart takes us from place to place. The tone is not so much humorous as affectionate. The bits about Jesus are refreshingly devoid of the usual obligatory reverence (the magi following the star are ‘three blundering eejits’; the hiding of Joseph and Mary from Herod’s persecution is almost slapstick).
I get the impression journalist-turned-novelist Quentin Letts, let off the leash from journalistic style constraints, is now free to use puns, emotive dialogue, juicy adjectives, colourful description, characterisation. The result is a flowering of creative expression. The characters are quirky and delicious. The settings are colourful, illuminated by almond blossoms, pistachio trees and bougainvillea. Artisans sell their aromatic wares, and merchants ply their trade.
The blend of modern anachronisms and ancient Palestine is cute (‘Thanks, Mum, said Caleb in the voice teenagers have used since Noah’s flood’). We’re tantalised by first century intimacies (the ‘different types of Pharisee’; the problem of cleaning the Holy of Holies—‘when the high priest enters, you don’t want him smothered by cobwebs. The dust might set off his allergy’) and glimpses of people we will meet in the Gospels (that little boy next to Aretas’ verandah will grow up to crucify Jesus).
Would also suit a YA readership. Non-Christians will love it, too.
An adorable book, 6 stars, a real pleasure to read.
This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.
September 5, 2025
Simeon's song as you've not thought of it before. A gentle, thoughtful, and humourous read. Delightful!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews