Shadows on the Rock

by Willa Cather

4 of 5 stars 1 rating • 1 review • 1 shelved
Book cover for Shadows on the Rock
Shelve It

Bookhype may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases. Full disclosure.

Willa Cather's novel of seventeenth-century Quebec is a luminous evocation of North American origins, and of the men and women who struggled to adapt to a new world even as they clung to the artifacts and manners of one they left behind.

In 1697, Quebec is an island of French civilization perched on a bare gray rock amid a wilderness of trackless forests. For many of its settlers, Quebec is a place of exile, so remote that an entire winter passes without a word from home. But to twelve-year-old Cécile Auclair, the rock is home, where even the formidable Governor Frontenac entertains children in his palace and beavers lie beside the lambs in a Christmas créche. As Cather follows this devout and resourceful child over the course of a year, she re-creates the continent as it must have appeared to its first European inhabitants. And she gives us a spellbinding work of historical fiction in which great events occur first as rumors and then as legends—and in which even the most intimate domestic scenes are suffused with a sense of wonder.
  • ISBN10 0679764046
  • ISBN13 9780679764045
  • Publish Date 26 September 1995 (first published 1 January 1931)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Out of Print 13 July 2011
  • Publish Country US
  • Imprint Random House USA Inc