The Power and the Glory

One of TIME Magazine's 100 best English-language novels, this tale of a fugitive priest in Mexico is quite simply "Graham Greene's masterpiece" (John Updike, The New York Review of Books ). 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. He's known only as the "whisky priest." Beset by heretical vices, guilt, and an immoral past, he's 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 hunted—attending, 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 it's a trap. But it's also his duty—and possibly his salvation. The Power and the Glory is "a violent, raw" work on "suffering, strained faith, and ultimate redemption" ( The Atlantic). "Attracts not only those who read for diversion and excitement, but those, too, who read for the pleasure of superb writing and shrewd contriving of story." — Chicago Tribune