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It's been over 50 years since Walter M. Miller Jr published A Canticle for Leibowitz . Now, in an important publishing event, here's his epic intellectual & emotional tour de force: In a world struggling to transcend a terrifying legacy of darkness--a world torn between love & violence, good & evil--one man undertakes an odyssey of discovery that promises to alter not only his destiny but the destiny of humanity as well. Millennia have passed since the Flame Deluge, yet society remains fragmented, pockets of civilization besieged by barbarians. The Church is in turmoil, the exiled papacy struggling to survive in its Rocky Mountain refuge. To the south, tyranny is on the march. Imperial Texark troops, bent on conquest, are headed north into the lands of the Nomads, spreading terror in their wake. Meanwhile, isolated in Leibowitz Abbey, Brother Blacktooth St George suffers a crisis of faith. Torn between his vows & a Nomad upbringing, between the Holy Virgin & visions of his people's Wild Horse Woman, he stands at the brink of disgrace & expulsion from his order. But he's offered an escape of sorts: an assignment as translator for Cardinal Brownpony, which will take him to the contentious election of a new pope & then on pilgrimage to New Rome. Journeying across a continent divided by nature, politics & war, Blacktooth is drawn into Brownpony's intrigues. He witnesses rebellion, assassination & human sacrifice. He's introduced to the sins that monastery life had held at bay. This introduction comes in the form of Aedrea, a beautiful but forbidden "genny" living among the deformed & mutant castouts in Texark's most hostile terrain. As Blacktooth encounters her repeatedly on his travels--in the flesh, in rumors of miraculous deeds & in fevered deliria--he begins to wonder if Aedrea is a she-devil, the Holy Mother or the Wild Horse Woman herself. Picaresque, passionate, dark & compellingly real, Saint Leibowitz & the Wi