In the early 1970s, Hannah Green and her husband came upon a small village called Conques, curled like a conch shell in the mountains of south-central France. Entranced, she returned to this numinous place again and again, drawn to the story of the little saint whose spirit fills the lives of the people there. Housed in the village’s yellow stone basilica sits the gold reliquary of Sainte Foy, who was beheaded in the fourth century for refusing to deny her faith before a Roman consul. Little Saint, a book written in ecstasy, is at once a moving and passionate tribute to Sainte Foy, a lyrical evocation of daily life in Conques, and a vivid chronicle of the author’s intensely felt spiritual journey.As evidenced by her successful novel The Dead of the House, Hannah Green possessed an acute awareness of early adolescence, the time in life we call coming of age. It’s no surprise that Green became entranced and eventually dedicated to a 12-year-old girl, who was known as Saint Foy. Betrayed by her father in 303 A.D., the French girl called Faith was tortured and beheaded for her refusal to worship the pagan goddess Diana and renounce her devotion to Christ.

Green narrates in the first person, recounting her reaction and fascination when she first traveled to Conques, France, and saw the golden statue of Saint Foy (with the girl’s bones embedded in the statue’s heart). Although pilgrims from all centuries and all parts of the world have paid homage to Saint Foy’s statue, Green had not anticipated the deep visceral reaction she would have when she first beheld the little saint. “It is a shrine,” she writes. “And in some mystic way it suggests to the mind’s eye more strongly than any imagined likeness could the presence of Saint Foy herself as she was, with her young fresh skin and the radiance, the life, in her face, the light, and as she is: bone and spirit come to God.”

This is a three-layered, masterful piece in which Green offers a biography of this young saint and the influence she’s had over the centuries, a profile of the highly unique village that hosts her statue, and finally a memoir of Green’s own spiritual epiphanies born from this saintly encounter. –Gail Hudson

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