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.