Black Narcissus

Five nuns confront nature—physical and human—in a remote Himalayan convent in this bestselling novel that "bears comparison with A Passage to India" (Arthur Koestler). Under the guidance of Sister Clodagh, the youngest Mother Superior in the history of their order, five European Sisters of the Servants of Mary leave their monastery in Darjeeling, India, and make their way to remote Mopu in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains. There, in the opulent, abandoned palace where an Indian general housed his harem, the holy sisters hope to establish a school and a health clinic. Their aim is to help combat superstition, ignorance, and disease among the mistrusting natives in the village below, and to silence the doubts of their royal benefactor's agent, the hard-drinking and somewhat disreputable Mr. Dean. But all too soon, the isolation, the ghosts and lurid history, and the literally breathtaking beauty of this high, lonely...