As a writer, reporter, converted Catholic, and even a double agent for the Secret Intelligent Service, British-born Graham Greene traveled to the farther, messier corners of the globe looking for illumination amid hypocritical social movements and gruesome war zones. From the rubble, Greene pulled out characters as gritty and shattered as the wreckage on which they stood.

In The Power and the Glory, the scene is a rural Communist state in Mexico. A priest has eluded the fate of his peers — who have either succumbed to marriage or the firing squad — and remained a working cleric in the destitute villages whose churches have all burnt down. Without the regiment of the Church, the whiskey priest must confront a more complicated notion of piety, as his morals quickly unravel into his bartering baptisms for brandy.

A leftist lieutenant in the capital makes it his mission to rid the state of this one last priest, tracking him across mountains and swamps and killing hostages in every village. Each time the priest is on the verge of crossing a border into safety, a desperate call from the dying in need of illicit prayers brings him back into the dark interior. On the lam, the priest meets gringos and mestizos who hide him, scorn him, betray him, and beg him for forgiveness.

Greene merges the sinner and the confessor — a dichotomy steeped in the prohibited sacramental wine — as the whiskey priest journeys across Mexico, finding pockets of both religion and anarchy, hope and despair. With no one left to hear the priest's own confessions, it falls to the reader to listen to him recount how he has sinned and why he does not regret it.

-McKay McFadden