Set against the backdrop of Notre-Dame of Paris, Cathedral is a thoughtful, engaging novel about encounters and places that change us and help us understand ourselves. Notre-Dame is the life-long obsession of a New Mexico lawyer who quits his job as a patent attorney for a national research lab in order to spend full-time pursuing his fascination with the cathedral's Gothic architecture and its patron saint. Although he is an agnostic, the shadow of the cathedral has accompanied him in life since his first look as a child at the towers, spire and flying buttresses of the medieval Catholic sanctuary. Studying Notre-Dame and its goddess also reveals for him the architecture of the human spirit but complicates his search for a companion who might share his infatuation with the greatest artistic and spiritual achievement of the Middle Ages. On April 15, 2019, he watches in disbelief from his Île Saint-Louis apartment balcony as Notre-Dame struggles to survive a conflagration that threatens to erase the cathedral from its proud place at the heart of Paris.
