Third is charming.

Mary Doria Russell has just published her third novel. The first two, The Sparrow and Children of God (Ballantine Books), are both science fiction and explore the faith realities of finding intelligent life elsewhere in the solar system. Jesuits, historically in the vanguard of earthly exploration, play a central part in both books. Many readers, Jesuits included, thought she captured the ethos, mythos, and yes, even the pathos of the Society of Jesus quite accurately.

This third book, A Thread of Grace (Random House), turns away from her exploration of the future and instead looks back--it's a historical novel set in Europe at the end of World War II.

I recently met Russell when she was on the obligatory book promotion tour. I had long been curious to know what her entree into Jesuit charism and culture had been and thought this would be a great opportunity to find out about her new book.

I arrived early for the reading at a mall bookstore and found a sandwich shop in the shadow of the bookstore to grab a bite to eat. Imagine my surprise when an unknown woman noticed the copy of Children of God on my table and said, "You're the first person I have ever run into that I've seen reading one of my books. And I'm always looking, particularly as I walk through airports." Like a friendly little bird that comes out of the sky to land, Mary Doria Russell stood before me. She too wanted a nosh before the book-signing.

Conversation came easily, primarily due to her effervescent personality and only secondarily to my curiosity. She told me about her Chicagoland upbringing in the suburb of Lombard, where she attended Sacred Heart grammar school, her one and only direct experience of Catholicism.

She eventually became a paleoanthropologist teaching at Case Western Reserve, writing scholarly articles on such varied subjects as bone biology and cannibalism. It was only after her department was shuttered at the university that she turned to writing what she thought would be a short story. It became her first novel, The Sparrow.

No big clues yet on just how she got the inside track on Jesuits. So I asked her directly, fully expecting to hear that she married one or, less romantically, had some connection with John Carroll University, located in Cleveland where she lives with her husband and 19-year-old son. "Library research," was her answer.

The inspiration for A Thread of Grace was that she had become fascinated with the fact that, at the end of World War II, more than 80 percent of Jews in Italy were still alive when only about 12 percent of Jews survived in other European countries. "What went right in Italy?" became the driving question for seven years as she researched and wrote this novel. "Fifty-thousand Jews were hidden in Italy; there were 50,000 Anne Franks."

Russell describes the novel as "a fictional building built with real bricks." In her extensive interviews she heard unbelievable stories of heroism from people who believed that living generously has its own rewards. "Everything you think is unbelievable in this book actually happened; everything you think is believable in this book, I made up."

Put A Thread of Grace on your must-read list for the summer.

PETER GILMOUR ([e-mail]) teaches at the Institute of Pastoral Studies of Loyola University Chicago.