Willa Cather. Used. Fine.
In 1848, the Vatican instructs the young bishop, Father Jean Marie Latour, to supervise a new Roman Catholic diocese in New Mexico. Travelling with his good friend, Father Joseph Vaillant, through a vast territory of red hills and twisting arroyos, the pair encounter natural adversity, corrupt Spanish priests, and the apathy of the Hopi and Navajo to establish their church and erect a cathedral in the unforgiving wilderness of the southwestern desert.
Fundamentally a character study, the novel examines Latour's inner struggles and his relationship with the land which, through Cather's beautiful and evocative descriptions, becomes a formidable, unyielding character in its own right. A powerful, epic tale in which time itself seems oddly suspended from events even as they unfold, Death Comes for the Archbishop is one of Willa Cather’s most celebrated works.