By François Mauriac | With an Essay by Anthony Esolen

Jean Péloueyre, as ingrate heir to an extensive French estate, is a maladroit, misshapen, misbegotten young man. The very antithesis of a hero, Jean stands very much in need of salvation. And yet, as Anthony Esolen writes in the essay accompanying the novel, “The redeemers and the redeemed are not whom we expect.” Against Nietzschean notions of power and sentimental dilutions of Christianity, François Mauriac casts Jean and his young bride, Noémie, as heroic cooperators in their redemption. Leprous, unenlightened souls though they be, their Redeemer nevertheless lovingly bore the punishment that makes them whole. 

Visceral, violent, and saturated with the mystery of mercy, A Kiss for the Leper firmly established future Nobel Prize-winner Mauriac as one of the twentieth century’s novelists of note, evidencing the genius which would come to full fruition in his later novels such as Vipers’ Tangle and A Woman of the Pharisees.

“There are no Masters. We are all of us born slaves and we grow into the freedom of the Lord.”

François Mauriac (1885–1970) was a French Catholic novelist, poet, critic, and journalist. Critically acclaimed and respected, Mauriac received the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française for his novel The Desert of Love; was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d’honneur; and named laureate of the 1952 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Paperback: 132pp.

ISBN: 978-1944418564