The Power and the Glory

This prize-winning novel 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. Named by Time magazine as one of the hundred best English-language novels written since 1923, The Power and the Glory is "a violent, raw" work on "suffering, strained faith, and ultimate redemption" (The Atlantic).

About the Author :
Graham Greene (1904-1991) is recognized as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, achieving both literary acclaim and popular success. His best known works include Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American, and The Power and the Glory. After leaving Oxford, Greene first pursued a career in journalism before dedicating himself full-time to writing with his first big success, Stamboul Train. He became involved in screenwriting and wrote adaptations for the cinema as well as original screenplays, the most successful being The Third Man. Religious, moral, and political themes are at the root of much of his work, and throughout his life he traveled to some of the wildest and most volatile parts of the world, which provided settings for his fiction. Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour.

Review :
"The Power and the Glory's nameless whisky priest blends seamlessly with his tropical, crooked, anti-clerical Mexico. Roman Catholicism is intrinsic to the character and terrain both; Greene's imaginative immersion in both is triumphant. . . . The energy and grandeur of [Greene's] finest novel derive from the will toward compassion, an ideal communism even more Christian than Communist. Its unit is the individual, not any class." --John Updike "Brilliant . . . a splendid achievement." --The Atlantic Monthly "As brilliantly written as it is magnificently conceived." --Chicago Sun "[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 "A thriller--but also a novel of ideas . . . A work of the highest literary art . . . A book I would have simply died to write." --Scott Turow, All Things Considered, NPR Praise for Graham Greene "The most ingenious, inventive and exciting of our novelists, rich in exactly etched and moving portraits of real human beings . . . A master of storytelling." --V. S. Pritchett, The Times (London) "In a class by himself . . . The ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety." --William Golding "A superb storyteller with a gift for provoking controversy." --The New York Times "Greene had the sharpest eyes for trouble, the finest nose for human weaknesses, and was pitilessly honest in his observations. . . . For experience of a whole century he was the man within." --Norman Sherry, The Independent "No serious writer of [the twentieth] century has more thoroughly invaded and shaped the public imagination than Graham Greene." --Time "One of the finest writers of any language." --The Washington Post "A superb storyteller--he had a talent for depicting local colour, a keen sense of the dramatic, an eye for dialogue, and skill in pacing his prose." --The New York Times "Graham Greene was a profound and experimental stylist." --Time Out "Graham Greene had wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the ranks of world literature." --John le Carré "Greene was a force beyond his books." --Melvyn Bragg "Greene's fictional products are to conventional mystery stories what an Alfred Hitchcock exercise in cinematic suspense is to the ordinary Grade B Whodunit." --Weekly Book Review "Mr. Greene's extraordinary power of plot-making, of suspense and of narration . . . moves continuously both in time and space and in emotion." --The Times (London) "Graham Greene taught us to understand the social and economic cripples in our midst. He taught us to look at each other with new eyes. I don't suppose his influence will ever disappear." --Auberon Waugh, The Independent "A masterly storyteller . . . An enormously popular writer who was also one of the most significant novelists of his time." --Newsweek