The Burning Bush, the second volume of Nobel Prize-winning Sigrid Undset’s novel The Winding Road, continues the story of Paul Selmer. His reception into the Catholic Church brings not peace, but conflict, into Paul’s life. The world plunges into the Great War and then begins to rebuild; Paul’s business swings between success to failure and his marriage starts to succumb to its wounds. Yet conversion is not a single, enclosed event, but a measured process of the heart’s return to God.

Neither mouthpiece nor mere symbol of the modern temperament, the character of Paul Selmer is a living, authentic product of art, planted firmly in the fertile soil of authentic experience. What she began in The Wild Orchid Undset masterfully completes in The Burning Bush, cultivating the seeds of grace and bringing them to full flower with devoted patience.