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In this hugely acclaimed author's new novel, history comes alive before us when, in the seventeenth century, a Jesuit missionary ventures into the wilderness in search of converts - the defining moment of first contact between radically different worlds, each at once old and new in its own ways. What unfolds over the next few years is truly epic, constantly illuminating and surprising, sometimes comic, always entrancing, and ultimately all-too-human in its tragic grandeur. Christophe, as educated as any Frenchman could be about the "sauvages" of the New World whose souls he has sworn to save, begins his true enlightenment shortly after he sets out when his native guides - terrified by even a scent of the Iroquois - abandon him to save themselves.