Shadows on the Rock

By Willa Cather On an October afternoon in the year 1697, Euclide Auclair watches the last summer ship set sail from Quebec for France. For the next eight months, this proud rock in the Northern wilderness where Euclide lives and raises his twelve-year-old daughter, Cécile, is entirely cut off from Europe, from the world. For the father, the New World is isolation, exile; for the daughter, it is home, a place of familiarity and miracle alike. Set against Canada’s unbounded wilderness, a year in the life of the Auclair family unfolds: a life of ordinary labors at home and in the shop; times of prayer and sacrifice; traditions of family and Church; memories of the past and dreams of the future; and the struggle of men and women—bishops and nuns, mothers and fathers, the poor and the powerful alike—to strike out and make life after their own fashion, or to live faithfully for God and in service to their neighbor and friend. Published in 1931, Shadows on the Rock is an imaginative and powerful portrayal of life seen through a young girl’s eyes of faith, Catholic and simple. Like Death Comes for the Archbishop, it refrains from “holding the note,” as Cather said; instead, it touches the essences of life, then humbly passes on. The result is a book of deep feeling without sentimentalism, of beauty without spectacle.  “Here everything is wild—the flowers just as much as the men.” (Marie de l’Incarnation)   Willa Cather (1873–1947) was an American writer and woman of letters whose fiction grew out of the land under her feet. Her novels include O Pioneers! (1913), My Ántonia (1918), and My Mortal Enemy (1926). Her novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), has been acclaimed as “illustrative of the wonder and beauty of Catholic mys­teries,” and is available from Cluny. * * * Paperback: 212pp. ISBN: 978-1685954888