some peoples lives are affected by what happens to their person or their property but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughtsthat and nothing more in this haunting 1935 novel the pulitzer prizewinning author of my ntonia and death comes for the archbishop performs a series of crystalline variations on the themes that preoccupy her greatest fiction the impermanence of innocence the opposition between prairie and city provincial american values and world culture and the grandeur elation and heartache that await a gifted young woman who leaves her small nebraska town to pursue a life in artat the age of eighteen lucy gayheart heads for chicago to study music she is beautiful and impressionable and ardent and these qualities attract the attention of clement sebastian an aging but charismatic singer who exercises all the tragic sinister fascination of a man who has renounced life only to turn back to seize it one last time out of their doomed love affairand lucys fatal estrangement from her originswilla cather creates a novel that is as achingly lovely as a schubert sonata