Little saint
“The majority of novels aren't half as well written as LITTLE SAINT . . . At bottom and essentially, this is a book about Faith.”
—New York Times Book Review
In the early 1970s, Hannah Green and her husband came upon a small village called Conques, curled like a conch shell in the mountains of south-central France. Entranced, she returned to this numinous place again and again, drawn to the story of the little saint whose spirit fills the lives of the people there. Housed in the village’s yellow stone basilica sits the gold reliquary of Sainte Foy, who was beheaded in the fourth century for refusing to deny her faith before a Roman consul. LITTLE SAINT, a book written in ecstasy, is at once a moving and passionate tribute to Sainte Foy, a lyrical evocation of daily life in Conques, and a vivid chronicle of the author’s intensely felt spiritual journey. Published posthumously in 2000, LITTLE SAINT beautifully conveys Green’s spiritual transformation.
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Turtle Point Press, 1996 (Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1972)
THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE
“I love it! . . . Sorrows and old family joys seem to pass through its pages like animals at midnight to stalk into some vault of breath and silence and fine attention.”
—Norman Mailer
A warm and profoundly felt evocation of family, this is the story of five generations of Nyes and DeGolyers, old American families of English, French, and Dutch descent, who settled in Cincinnati in the 1870s. Narrated by Vanessa Nye, a young girl growing up in Ohio in the ‘30s and ‘40s, it is also a portrait of the artist as she emerges into the sensuality of adolescence, preoccupied with summer vacations at Lake Michigan, books, and flirting. Above all, however, Vanessa’s mind is drawn to Grandpa Nye who will become – in later years when he is gone and she sets out to write – the hero of her book.
Told in delicately distilled prose, the three parts of this novel encompass both a personal journey and the history of a family that harkens back to the mythology of the American West.