The Bible Repairman is Tim Powers’s collection of five stories and an ambitious historical novella.

The title story takes us into the life of a man with a most unusual profession, one that claims a little bit of his soul with every transaction. “Parallel Lives” and “A Soul in a Bottle” are thematically linked ghost stories in which the dead attempt, with varying degrees of success, to exert their influence upon the living. In “The Hour of Babel,” an assortment of damaged people experience the inexplicable encounter that altered their lives more than thirty years before, while in ”A Journey of Only Two Paces” a simple legal procedure is transformed into a nightmarish Kabbalistic ritual.

The novella “A Time to Cast Away Stones” is set in the semi-fictional universe first described in The Stress of Her Regard. This narrative centers upon Edward John Trelawny, a contemporary and compatriot of the poets Byron and Shelley, and the momentous decision that faces him. The story shows an actual historical event reclaimed and transformed, focusing on the life of Trelawny.