Lucy Gayheart

By: Willa Cather

Narrated by: Kirsten Potter

In this haunting 1935 novel, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of My Ántonia performs crystalline variations on the themes that preoccupy her greatest fiction: the impermanence of innocence, the opposition between prairie and city, provincial American values and world culture, and the grandeur, elation, and heartache that await a gifted young woman who leaves her small Nebraska town to pursue a life in art.

At the age of eighteen, Lucy Gayheart heads for Chicago to study music. She is beautiful and impressionable and ardent, and these qualities attract the attention of Clement Sebastian, an aging but charismatic singer who exercises all the tragic, sinister fascination of a man who has renounced life only to turn back to seize it one last time. Out of their doomed love affair—and Lucy's fatal estrangement from her origins—Willa Cather creates a novel that is as achingly lovely as a Schubert sonata.

Critic reviews

"The unity of Miss Cather's design, the clarity and distinction of this book, should put it beside her first great success, My Ántonia." —The Times Literary Supplement (London)

Dazzlingly sad

The reading of this boos was flawless. The book itself was heartbreaking yet glittering in its telling of the one human truth—free will.

Beautifully written and narrated!

My first book listened to by Willa Cather. A melancholy yet exquisite story. I look forward to enjoying more books by this exceptional author.