Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. Timeless and unforgettable, The Power and the Glory is a stunning portrait of both physical and spiritual survival by a master dramatist of the human soul. As he scraps his way toward salvation, haunted by an affair from his past, the nameless 'whiskey priest' is pulled between the bottle and the Bible, tempted to renounce his religion yet unable to ignore the higher calling he's chosen. Now the last priest is on the run, fleeing not just an unshakable police lieutenant but also his own wavering morals.

Mexico, the late 1930s: A paramilitary group has outlawed the Catholic Church and is executing its clergy.

Named one of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century by Time magazine, it stands today as his masterpiece. 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 Book 'First published in the United States of America under the title 'The labyrinthine ways' by The Viking Press 1940'-Title page verso.īook Synopsis One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, in a new edition commemorating its 75th anniversary Seventy-five years ago, Graham Greene published The Power and the Glory, a moralist thriller that traces a line of influence back to Dostoyevsky and forward to Cormac McCarthy. But it's also his duty-and possibly his salvation. 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. 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. 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.

As churches are razed, icons are banned, and the price of devotion is execution, an unnamed member of the clergy flees.

In the Mexican state of Tabasco in the 1930s, all vestiges of Catholicism are being outlawed by the government. 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 ).

The power and the glory book