Daydreaming about sex has gotten more than one person through a boring church service, but Kenneth Radu’s Strange and Familiar Places carries mental escapism to new heights. Radu’s heroine Evelyn is always on the lookout for no-commitment sex – despite the fact that her husband Paul is a clergyman. Singing hymns after one of Paul’s belaboured sermons, Evelyn imagines “running her tongue over the back of the neck of whatever man stood in the pew in front of her. Age, height, weight, even looks and personality, barring extreme deformity of character, were irrelevant when it came to satisfaction of desire.”

When the book opens, Evelyn has three lovers: the 60ish church janitor, his skinny 30-something son, and one of the pillars of her husband’s congregation. Keeping them straight while she fulfills the many do-gooder jobs that are the lot of a minister’s wife could be the stuff of a Feydeau farce. Radu, however, does not have comic intentions. He makes the graphically described sex that Evelyn enjoys as serious as the religious experience through which Paul became convinced of his Christian vocation. Indeed, sex and faith have a lot in common: both “shut the door against reason,” posits Evelyn early in the book.

To ensure that readers don’t think the worst of Evelyn, Radu includes the menace of truly ugly sexuality as a constrast: a mysteriously attractive man who kidnaps and abuses children. Evelyn, Paul, and their 14-year-old daughter Cecily brush up against this figure, whose evil presence is the motor driving the plot.

There are some splendid descriptions of music, art, farm auctions, and various forms of sexual congress. Thoughtful literary and symbolic resonances abound too: Evelyn’s thoughts at times sound like Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in James Joyce’s Ulysses, while the Christmas pageant Cecily puts on conjures up Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as well as St.Cecilia, the patron saint of music.

Be forewarned: The book’s eroticism may distract some readers, while the pivotal character, plucked straight from a male fantasy, may infuriate others.