title: At Play in the Fields of the Lord
author:  Peter Matthiessen 
description: Set in the South American jungle, this thriller follows the clash between two misplaced gringos--one who has come to convert the Indians to Christianity, and one who has been hired to kill them. Now the basis for a major motion picture.
zlib_text: PETER MATTHIESSEN’S  
  At Play in the Fields of the Lord
  
  “Powerful, intricate, superbly constructed … a challenging and absorbing
  work.”
  
  —New York Post
  
  “A brutal yet compassionate narrative … that will remain long in the reader’s
  mind.”
  
  —Minneapolis Star and Tribune
  
  “Glorious … It calls forth every shred of the reader’s imagination, it enlists
  every emotion.”
  
  —Fort Worth Star-Telegram
  
  “There seems to be no limit to what Matthiessen can accomplish in this
  extraordinary story.… Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad would admire such a
  novel as this. At Play in the Fields of the Lord is, in all probability, a
  great novel which will be read a hundred years hence, and which would have
  been just as important had it been written a hundred years ago.”
  
  —Women’s Wear Daily
  
  “Matthiessen has admirably fulfilled the goals of any serious novelist: not
  only to tell a gripping story with uncommon conviction, but to contrive a
  fictional world which seems utterly real and which, by extension, illumina