Cathedral

Set against the backdrop of Notre-Dame of Paris, Cathedral

is a thoughtful, engaging novel about encounters and

places that change us and help us understand ourselves.

Notre-Dame is the life-long obsession of a New Mexico lawyer

who quits his job as a patent attorney for a national research lab

in order to spend full-time pursuing his fascination with the

cathedral’s Gothic architecture and its patron saint. Although

he is an agnostic, the shadow of the cathedral has accompanied

him in life since his first look as a child at the towers, spire and

flying buttresses of the medieval Catholic sanctuary. Studying

Notre-Dame and its goddess also reveals for him the architecture

of the human spirit but complicates his search for a companion

who might share his infatuation with the greatest artistic and

spiritual achievement of the Middle Ages. On April 15, 2019, he

watches in disbelief from his Île Saint-Louis apartment balcony

as Notre-Dame struggles to survive a conflagration that threatens

to erase the cathedral from its proud place at the heart of Paris.