Little Saint [Paperback]

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.Praise for Little Saint

"The majority of novels aren't half as well written asLittle Saint... At bottom and essentially, this is a book about Faith."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Not only a record of religious experience but a rapturous hymn to the saint and her devoted villagers."
--The New Yorker

"A miracle ... utterly endearing....Little Saintshould endure as long as the bones of Conques."
--Chicago Tribune

"This strange and beautiful book, with its magical sentences that dance and sing right off the page into the reader's heart, seamlessly weaves the remote past into the living present more than any work I know. Learned, complex, exuberant, and deeply personal, this meditation on the millennia-long life of a French child martyr is a fitting climax to Hannah Green's devoted life of letters."
-- Alix Kates Shulman, author ofDrinking the Rain

"In this glorious work, Hannah Green takes us to the ancient village of Conques, into the world of the sacred and the simple everyday. As she and her husband, Jack, are embraced by the villagers, we too feel intimately welcomed. We meet the wonderful ninety-one-and-a-half-year-old (!) Madaml#A