The Saint

When Piero Maironi abandoned the woman he loved to become an ascetic called Benedetto, he believed he had finally found peace. Years of prayer and mortification have transformed the conflicted artist into something like a saint. But Jeanne Dessalle has returned to Bruges, to the villa by the Lac d'Amour where they once dreamed of a life together, and the carefully constructed walls of his faith begin to crack. As the city spreads its Gothic mysteries around her, its silent belfries, its canal-streets of forgetting, she grapples with what was taken from her and what he chose. Fogazzaro's 1905 masterpiece caused a scandal that echoed across Europe: a novel that dared to ask whether holiness might be another word for evasion, whether devotion can be a form of cowardice, and whether love refused is ever truly overcome. Set against the atmospheric grey canals of Bruges, this is a novel about the impossible bargains we make with God, and the ones we make with ourselves.