Keziah's Song

Maccabean Israel, 135 BCE. Judean orphan Keziah has been traumatized by a savage war. As the Greek empire invades Jerusalem with battle elephants and a ruthless army, the 12-year-old witnesses her parents' violent murder by their once-trusted neighbours. Keziah has no time to mourn when she's forcibly transported to the far north and ripped away from everything she's ever known.

92 BCE. A widow and an old scribe together raise Haim, a boy whose lineage cursed him from birth. When Haim is 11 years old, he runs away into a world populated by Samaritan bandits, a cultic pagan temple devoted to horror, and the whiterobed priests of Qumran. Desperate and lonely, Haim searches for community, friendship, and belonging while being plagued by a hunger for meaning he cannot satisfy.

The Middle East, 76 BCE. Internal power struggles consume Jerusalem’s attention while surrounding nations manipulate events for their own purposes. Two young women from opposite worlds—Pninah, a poor Jewish girl prone to seizures and Cypros, a Nabataean princess—are thrust by violent events into a collision course with each other and history. By capturing the era and its people with his characteristic raw intimacy and plainsong prose style, Daryl Potter brings the story of Herod the Great’s mother and a fateful Roman invitation vividly to life.