Shadows on the Rock

By: Willa Cather

Narrated by: Ann Marie Lee

"Superbly written, with that sensitivity to sunset and afterglow that has always been Miss Cather's."
—The New York Times

Willa Cather wrote Shadows on the Rock immediately after her historical masterpiece, Death Comes for the Archbishop. Like its predecessor, this novel of seventeenth-century Quebec is a luminous evocation of North American origins, and of the men and women who struggled to adapt to that 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.

Beautiful Quebec

Another magnificent novel by Willa Cather about the settlement of a new frontier told in the stories of it's complex characters.

History lesson!

This was such a good glimpse into the past. I loved the way the author saw it thru the eyes of the characters. I truly believe the trials they went thru moulded our country!

The reader failed...

I love Willa Cather and this book was very interesting but the reader was dreadful. Her presentation was juvenile and her pronunciation of both English and French words was awful.

Quintessential Willa Cather

This quintessential Willa Cather story weaves and wonderful narrative history, fictionalized, of the early years of Quebec. A very fine piece of literature and thoroughly enjoyable read.

her descriptions of another time and place

her descriptions of another time and place and pace of life. her soothing, enjoyable writing was done well by the narrator.