'You have come to destroy me - you who can save me with your silence. You have come to destroy me and all I can do to absolve myself is to offer you my words as I have offered you my skin, to take your hand and guide it over my memories as if they were my flesh, as if I could seduce you with my tale instead of my passion.'
"Is Truth more urgent than Desire?"
After years reporting on the world's war-zones, Adam returns home to the wild Appalachian mountains of Kentucky to investigate the death of Little Sam Jenkins - evangelist, snake-handler, womaniser, and also his father. Ninety-year-old Little Sam was bitten by a snake his faith couldn't defeat, handed to him by one of his followers - a beautiful young Kurdish woman called Blue.
With violet eyes, red-golden hair and reputation for being immune from earthly harm, Blue has a magic of her own, brought from the tribe she left at thirteen, and unextinguished by America and the cool reason of her husband the Professor. Irresistibly, defiantly and fatally, she is drawn to the fervour of the Appalachian Holiness snake-handlers, and then to Adam.
In Adam and Blue's fierce relationship, love collides with faith, and beauty is opposed to truth, in a conflict which could destroy or redeem them.
Written in mesmerising prose, Gina Nahai's new novel spans two extraordinary cultures at different ends of the world, united only by the intensity of their beliefs and the charismatic characters at their centre.
