Publisher Description
From National Book Award-winning writer James Carroll comes a novel of the timeless love story of Peter Abelard and Héloïse, and its impact on a modern priest and a Holocaust survivor seeking sanctuary in Manhattan. Father Michael Kavanagh is shocked when he sees a friend from his seminary days at the altar of his humble parish in upper Manhattan—a friend who was forced to leave under scandalous circumstances. Compelled to reconsider the past, Father Kavanagh wanders into the medieval haven of the Cloisters and stumbles into a conversation with a lovely and intriguing docent, Rachel Vedette. Having survived the Holocaust and escaped to America, Rachel remains obsessed with her late father’s greatest scholarly achievement: a study demonstrating the relationship between the famously discredited monk Peter Abelard and Jewish scholars. Feeling an odd connection with Father Kavanagh, Rachel shares with him the work that cost her father his life. At the center of these interrelated stories is the classic romance between the great philosopher Abelard and his intellectual equal, Héloïse. For Rachel, Abelard is the key to understanding her people’s place in history. And for Father Kavanagh, the controversial theologian may be a doorway to understanding the life he himself might have had outside the Church.
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About James Carroll
James Carroll is the author of twelve novels, most recently The Cloister, and nine works of nonfiction. For twenty-three years he published a weekly op-ed column in the Boston Globe. Other books include the National Book Award–winning An American Requiem; the New York Times bestselling Constantine’s Sword, winner of the National Jewish Book Award; House of War, winner of the PEN/Galbraith Award; and Jerusalem, Jerusalem. Carroll is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and an associate of the Mahindras Humanities Center at Harvard University. He lives in Boston with his wife, the writer Alexandra Marshall. Visit him at www.JamesCarroll.net.