The Ramsays spend their summers on the Isle of Skye, where they happily entertain friends and family and make idle plans to visit the nearby lighthouse. Over the course of the book, the lighthouse becomes a silent witness to the ebbs and flows, the births and deaths, that punctuate the individual lives of the Ramsays.  

In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows—gently, all the while contending with an unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Out of these events, Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended.