“How to Be Good” is a story for our times—a humorous but uncompromising look at what it takes, in this day and age, to have the courage of our convictions. In his third novel, Nick Hornby, whom “The New Yorker” named “the maestro of the male confessional,” has reinvented himself as Katie—the consummate liberal, urban mom—a doctor from North London whose world is being turned on its ear by the outrageous spiritual transformation of her husband, David.

“How to Be Good” has the ironic, funny, startlingly accurate take on our modern selves and our modern world that has become Hornby’s turf as a chronicler of our popular culture—but this time he tackles it all with more richness and depth, and carries his readers beyond the comic confines of the novel to a bigger truth about themselves. It’s a story about how to wreck your marriage, how to help the homeless, how not to raise your kids, how to find religion… and how to be good.