The Power And The Glory

Set in 1930s Tabasco, a Mexican state whose government was trying to suppress the Catholic Church, Graham Greene's novel follows an unnamed whisky priest, the last one still at large after the clergy have been outlawed and hunted down. He drinks heavily, has fathered a child and feels unworthy, yet he keeps moving through the countryside to bring the sacraments to poor peasants. Pursuing him is a police lieutenant of rigid principle. Greene coined the term whisky priest for the book, which first appeared in the United States as The Labyrinthine Ways. In 1941 it received the Hawthornden Prize, a British award.

A roundup of every book Barack Obama recommended during his presidency includes it.