Faruq Zaidi, a Pakistani-American journalist mourning the recent loss of his father, a devout Muslim. He is given an assignment for the journal he works for. It is to write an investigative feature about a cult called the “nameless” which quickly turns personal. The world of “the nameless is a California-based cult led by Odo, a Vietnam War veteran turned spiritual leader. The Nameless live by the 18 Utterances, doctrines both mystical and seductive. He goes deeper into the movement, staying first with the San Francisco devotees Clover and Aeschylus and eventually enters the cult’s Forbidden City in the redwoods, the line between observer and participant begins to blur. Will he become a member of the cult?

The author has written about Odo’s past in Vietnamese. He also includes Nero from a documentary which the cult gives a chilling, meta-narrative commentary. These two threads are parallel to Faruq’s narrative. The themes of the book include identity, faith and the cost of belonging. The book is fiction yet at the same time as I read it “felt” like nonfiction. I didn’t expect this book to be about faith and doubt.

I don't know if I ultimately understood exactly what Cuffy was trying to say in this book, but I did find most of it fascinating. The questions of belief and the line between religion and cult, fanaticism and devotion, were interesting and parsed out well.

But the characters, despite our spending so much time with them, never felt fully realized to me. Odo is a blank page, and even with the flashbacks to his time in Vietnam, it never felt like we got to know anything about him. He answers questions with questions, platitudes with platitudes, to the point that he often seemed to be speaking nonsense; where was the charisma that his followers saw in him?

I never fully connected to this book. There was little warmth here, which would have helped make these characters feel more real, more natural. Instead it felt like they began life as a creative writing prompt in a well-to-do graduate program.. I much preferred Cuffy's last novel because there was connection there, emotion and feeling; that was lacking in her follow-up.

I was looking forward to reading this book because be all accounts it should have been right up my alley, but it was such a slog. The disjointed nature of alternating timelines coupled with the script interstitial really made it difficult for me to connect with the story. I wish the book just focused on the cult and an examination of the allure of belief. That would have been a big improvement. Although I found even those sections kind of infuriating because Odo is such a off-putting sanctimonious blow-hard that says nothing interesting or meaningful and yet we’re supposed to believe that Faruq is seduced by his preternatural insightfulness. I just couldn’t buy into this. This one was not my favorite.

This book caught my attention immediately by the description after having no past knowledge of the book or author. I was drawn to the plot (we love a cult story) and was very pleased with the writing style and cadence of the book. I'll 100% seek out more by Nicole in the future.

O Sinners! is a compelling novel that delves deep into the complexities of faith, trauma, and personal identity. Nicole Cuffy weaves a rich narrative that explores the impact of cults and the struggles of reconciling past wounds, including haunting Vietnam War flashbacks, which add emotional depth to the story.

The characters feel real and flawed, and the exploration of difficult themes is handled with sensitivity and nuance. While the pacing occasionally slows, the overall story is gripping and thought-provoking, offering plenty to reflect on long after the last page.

This book is a strong choice for readers who appreciate stories that challenge perspectives and explore the darker corners of human experience with empathy.

Would’ve been 4 stars but it has instagram picture descriptions?????? so docked it a star.

Overall, the plot had a good grip on me, story telling was well paced, and character development was 10/10.

A thrilling reflective journey through America's past. A little overwrought at times, but stunning nonetheless.

This was an interesting read about a man struggling with his faith, the death of his father and his mother’s death several years ago. As a journalist he decides to learn more about a new movement that has become popular and created its critics. Some believe it is a cult.
While writing his story Fariq finds himself changing. Is he falling for the Nameless ideals or he becoming more introspective?
Told in three different voices, Odo as a soldier in Vietnam, a transcript of a documentary made about the homeless and current time. It was a slow read but kept my attention. However, the ending left me feeling a bit hollow. I really didn’t understand the ending, I may go back and reread it again, but ambiguous endings are not my favorite.

O Sinners! is a bold, thought-provoking novel that dives deep into grief, belief, and the pull of belonging. It follows Faruq, a journalist grieving the loss of his partner, as he infiltrates a mysterious cult—and slowly finds himself questioning everything he thought he knew.

The storytelling is layered and lyrical, weaving past and present in a way that feels both intimate and unsettling. Nicole Cuffy does an incredible job capturing the vulnerability that draws people to faith, even when it turns dangerous.

If you like literary fiction that challenges you and stays with you, this one is a powerful, unforgettable read.

It took me forever to get into this book, but it was worth the work. It is definitely a very slow paced and relatively quiet story. Dont expect a huge climactic scene. Also- Don’t be fooled by the incredible cover - this book is tough. O Sinners takes a somewhat journalistic look into a cult and into war - two very heavy topics. The layout is strange but it works for this particular story. At times it felt like I was reading two different books at once but ultimately mostly everything came together. A handful of scenes - such as descriptions of war - were almost *too* well-written in the fact that the author did such a good job of transporting me there.

This book sounds right up my alley: dual time lines, mixed media and a cult?! I was beyond excited to read it. I started this book and put it down 2 different times until finally I was able to read it to the end on the 3rd time but something just wasn’t clicking for me and I’m honestly not sure what it was.

This book wasn’t for me but it wasn’t bad either.

I had high hopes for this book, but unfortunately, it fell flat. There was little to no investment in the characters, making it hard to care about their journeys or outcomes. The Forbidden City was set up as a major element but ended up being disappointingly under-described and underused. The dual timelines felt unnecessary and added little to the present-day narrative. Overall, the story was far too lengthy for what it delivered and could have benefited from tighter editing and a more focused plot.

I was very excited to read this book. The story sounded so interesting. Ultimately it fell flat for me. It was hard to get through and I didn’t find the characters compelling. Faruq’s story could have been so insightful, but I feel like I didn’t get to know him as well as I would have liked. The documentary and Vietnam flashbacks were confusing and broke up the narrative too much. It felt repetitive while we were with the nameless too.

This was one of those stories that slowly sinks into your soul and leaves a mark. There are some subtle mixed media vibes with the interjection of documentary screenplay slipped between the chapters and made the story feel less like fiction and more like a twisted piece of non-fiction. Faruq Zaidi is a journalist from New York that is having a hard time processing the death of his devoutly Muslim father. Faruq has plans to take time off and embed himself in a cult known as “the nameless” deep in the California redwoods. Odo is the enigmatic leader of the nameless, a Vietnam war veteran, and a true believer in what he calls the 18 utterances. Faruq is drawn deeper into the cult’s inner workings, remains cut off from society and extends his stay all with the hope of unraveling the mysteries of the nameless but finds that he is the one that is unraveling. He is forced to come to terms with all that he has been running from, while trying not to get sucked into the group’s magic. The story is told from three points of view- the present-day life of Faruq, Vietnam “flashbacks” of Odo’s time as an infantryman and in the above-mentioned documentary screenplay that depicts the clash of the Nameless with a Texas fundamentalist church. I personally loved the Vietnam flashbacks the most and wish more of the story was centered on that, but then this wouldn’t be the deep book that it is. This is a tale of grief and a tale of confusion. This is a story of love and a story of faith. I think that anyone who picks up this book will be forced more than once to stop and think about the purpose of life and their place in the world. The setting of this book perfectly matches the mood of each point of view- The comfort of the redwoods, the self-discovery that comes with being in another country and the harsh prairie existence where it seems like nothing is your friend. Nicole Cuffy delivers this slightly horrific story with beautiful prose and thoughtful introspection. This book just feels like it will be one of the top literary fiction books this year.

This just had a lot going on. I couldn’t follow, i don’t know if it was because of the subject material or the story telling, but it just wasn’t for me.

O Sinners! is unexpectedly a bildungsroman novel of Faruq's self-discovery. It is a bit misleading to mention the cult in the description as I know very little about the cult itself and less about its followers. The leader, Odo, is interesting enough, but too much time is spent on his time in Vietnam with too little payout. The big moments are skimmed over, leaving us trudging through the bush with the soldiers more often than learning relevant information. I wanted to know more about the cult and who Odo really was. There is much deflection and distortion instead. Faruq's story is the most interesting, and I would have loved to read the book he really wanted to write, at the very least an excerpt at the end.
TW: there are a LOT of racial slurs in this novel. Brace yourself before reading the Vietnam flashbacks.
Thanks to NetGalley and Random House, One World for this ARC!

Thank you to One World for the copy! A lot of moving parts in this one, and not all entirely relevant or cataclysmic to the story. O Sinners! delves into a religious—or from the followers' perspectives, non-religious (yet still upholding concepts of god and dogma, etc.)—cult called the Nameless. At the center is the mystical and enigmatic Odo, whose backstory is told in Vietnam War flashbacks in between added context from documentary transcripts. And since that's somehow not enough, there's also our actual protagonist, Faruq, a journalist investigating the Nameless while struggling to reconcile with the recent death of his father.

With all of the narrative shifts, and even Instagram descriptions thrown into the mix, it often felt like there was a lot going on, but there were moments where I'd look up from the book and think how little the story's actually progressed. I think about 75% of the way through, I started to wonder where all of this was really going.

Although spirituality as a concept and practice is explored all throughout, I still felt like there was something missing as a whole. There's acts of defiance against religion, disbelief, and surrendering, yet none of it felt entwined with the other. They were all just pieces to the plot rather than genuine elements of a crafted story. The ending ultimately feels unearned and falls flat due to that lack of interconnectedness, especially with the Vietnam War flashbacks.

Those chapters were also some of the least appealing parts of the book. I don't want to negate the historical accuracy of the dehumanizing levels of racism towards the Vietnamese people but damn that was a lot of slur usage lol

2.5 rounded down!

An interesting read I didn’t really know what I was getting into. There is 3 different parts to this with so much going on. I felt like the war narrative was an interesting addition. Lots of confusing parts where I really did not know what was going on.

Unfortunately this really didn't work for me. O Sinners! seems caught between two aims -- the hope of being commercially successful and a lot of fun and the dream of being meaningful and wise. As so often seems to happen, it fails utterly to balance these two goals and winds up a big soggy mess that is too confusing and boring for the commercial reader and too stupid and shallow for the literary one. I've seen a lot of this sort of fish-nor-fowl novel in the past few years and it's frustrating because it seems so clearly to be a function of the state of the publishing industry and, more importantly, a waste of time and good ideas. I don't think Nicole Cuffy is a bad writer, but this book does her no credit.

I really tried to get into this because I liked the premise, but it was just too difficult. This wasn't for me but I don't want to say it was bad.