Novel
The Shoes of the Fisherman
Morris West · 1963
Synopsis
Kiril Lakota, a Ukrainian archbishop freed from a Siberian camp, is the youngest of the cardinals gathered in Rome after the death of a pope; Cardinal Rinaldi has him preach before the conclave, and he is elected on the first ballot. Having become Kiril I, he wants a Church turned towards souls, walks around Rome in a plain cassock and faces a world threatened by famine and the nuclear arms race. Kamenev, the Soviet leader who was his jailer, asks him to help ease tensions, while the Jesuit Jean Télémond comes to Rome to seek the right to publish his theology of evolution.
Context
The novel was published on 3 June 1963, the very day of the death of John XXIII; the author had been the Vatican correspondent of the Daily Mail since 1956. Kiril is modelled on the Ukrainian cardinal Josyf Slipyj and on Bishop Hryhorij Lakota, a victim of the gulag; Telemond borrows from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The book topped the sales lists in the United States on 30 June 1963 and was the best-selling novel in the country that year; in 1968 Michael Anderson made a film of it with Anthony Quinn.
Who it is for
A novel in English, translated into French by Plon as soon as it appeared, under the title Les Souliers de saint Pierre.
Prizes and reception
More than six million copies sold, for a novel published on the day a pope died.