In the first of this sweeping trilogy of novels, Marek Halter brings the Old Testament to life through its most vivid heroine: Sarah, wife of Abraham - a woman with an epic story of her own.
Women play a pivotal role in the Bible, yet their fates are generally summarised in just a few lines. Now Marek Halter tells the stories of three of its most important heroines: Sarah, the Sumerian aristocrat who struggled to bear a child; Zipporah, the African immigrant who begged Moses to create laws to protect the weak; and Lilah, the prophet Ezrah's sister, who fought against the mounting religious extremism of the era. Above all, it is the courage and spirit of these women that make them and their narratives uplifting and extraordinarily compelling.
People may know that Abraham, the Patriarch of the Old Testament, was the first man to spread God's word. But how many know of his wife, Sarah? How she was born into a wealthy and powerful family in the Sumerian city of Ur? Or how, at the age of twelve, escaping her own wedding ceremony, she ran to the banks of the Euphrates river and into the arms of a young stranger camped on the outskirts of the city.
His name was Abraham and, although he was a member of a poor nomadic tribe, their night together was enough to convince Sarah that their future lay together. And so Sarah abandoned everything- wealth, family and status- to follow Abraham and his alien God; a God of whom no one had ever heard; a God who was invisible and who appeared to communicate solely through her husband; a God who, one day, would command Abraham to kill their beloved son in his name, and to whom Sarah would beg for mercy . . .
Set against the epic backdrop of the Sumerain cities of Ur and Babylon four thousand years ago, and in the arid wastelands of the Arabian desert, Marek Halter brings an ancient world vividly to life through the eyes of a beautiful and passionate woman.
