I'm going to nominate what is considered to be Willa Cather's masterpiece,
Death Comes for the Archbishop, a retelling of the life of Jean-Baptiste Lamy, the first archbishop of Santa Fe. It is on the Modern Library list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century and Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.
Quote:
There is something epic—and almost mythic—about this sparsely beautiful novel by Willa Cather, although the story it tells is that of a single human life, lived simply in the silence of the desert. In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows—gently, although he must contend with an unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. One of these events Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended.
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Public domain in Life+70 countries and shorter.
MobileRead Library epub: Free |
Feedbooks: Free |
Kindle US: $9.99 | OverDrive, Audible
300 pp.