This prize-winning novel of a fugitive priest in Mexico is quite simply βGraham Greeneβs masterpieceβ (John Updike, The New York Review of Books).
Β
In the Mexican state of Tabasco in the 1930s, all vestiges of Catholicism are being outlawed by the government. As churches are razed, icons are banned, and the price of devotion is execution, an unnamed member of the clergy flees. Heβs known only as the βwhisky priest.β Beset by heretical vices, guilt, and an immoral past, heβs torn between self-destruction and self-preservation. Too modest to be a martyr, too stubborn to follow the law, and too craven to take a bullet, he now travels as one of the huntedβattending, in secret, to the spiritual needs of the faithful. When a peasant begs him to return to Tabasco to hear the confessions of a dying man, the whisky priest knows itβs a trap. But itβs also his dutyβand possibly his salvation.
Β
Named by Time magazine as one of the hundred best English-language novels written since 1923, The Power and the Glory is βa violent, rawβ work on βsuffering, strained faith, and ultimate redemptionβ (The Atlantic).