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The Liars' Gospel
  • Published: 21 November 2012
  • ISBN: 9780670919925
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

The Liars' Gospel

From the author of The Power, winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2017




He was a traitor, a rabble-leader, a rebel, a liar and a pretender to the throne. We have tried to forget him here.

This is the story of a Jewish man, Yehoshuah, who wandered Roman-occupied Judea giving sermons and healing the sick. Now, a year after his death, four people tell their stories. His mother flashes between grief and rage while trouble brews between her village and the occupying soldiers. Iehuda, who was once Yehoshuah's friend, recalls how he came to lose his faith and find a place among the Romans. Caiaphas, the High Priest at the great Temple in Jerusalem, tries to hold the peace between Rome and Judea. Bar-Avo, a rebel, strives to bring that peace tumbling down.

This thrilling novel makes the oldest story entirely new. Viscerally powerful in its depictions of the realities of the period: massacres and riots, animal sacrifice and human betrayal, it finds echoes of the present in the past. It was a time of political power-play and brutal tyranny and occupation. Young men and women took to the streets to protest. Dictators put them down with iron force. Rumours spread from mouth to mouth. Rebels attacked the greatest Empire the world has ever known. The Empire gathered its forces to make those rebels pay.

And in the midst of all of that, one inconsequential preacher died. And either something miraculous happened, or someone lied.

  • Published: 21 November 2012
  • ISBN: 9780670919925
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

About the author

Naomi Alderman

Naomi A. Alderman's first novel, Disobedience, was published in 2006 in ten languages and won the Orange Award for New Writers. In 2007, she was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and one of Waterstone's 25 Writers for the Future. Her second novel, The Lessons, was published in April 2010. Naomi was lead writer on the BAFTA-shortlisted alternate reality game Perplex City and writes a weekly games column for the Guardian. Naomi A. Alderman's 2017 novel, The Power was the winner of the 2017 Baileys women’s prize for fiction.

Also by Naomi Alderman

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Praise for The Liars' Gospel

A glittering style, a compulsive pleasure

Metro

Exciting, entertaining and enthralling read - this is story telling of the very highest order. It's certainly one of my books of the year.

Bookbag

The dark wit that characterised her previous novels, Disobedience and The Lessons, runs through this book as an undercurrent, but The Liars' Gospel shows the hand of a mature novelist, a daring and accomplished work on a broad canvas. She is as much at home describing the sorrow of a mother as the cut and thrust of theological debate, as convincing on the weariness of a man forced into moral compromise as the rush of blood in a teenage boy caught up in his first riot. She paints the sweep of history through the sharp pain of human love and loss, and it is a remarkable achievement.

Stephanie Merritt, The Observer

Remarkable. Alderman is a supremely talented writer

Joanne Harris

A series of thoughtful, humane sketches that seek to earnestly put the meat of character on the bones of the bible... An evocative, secular exploration of the New Testaments' sprawling horizons

Metro

Witty, dark and compelling

Charlotte Mendelson

Marvellously told and wonderfully done

Maeve Kennedy

Such intensity ... a big book about history and violence, you can feel the blood running off the page. It is also a very personal and human book

Dreda Say Mitchell

First piece I've read that puts you completely into the Jewish history. A fascinating new look

Cahal Dallat

Gripping and visceral

Arifa Akbar, The Independent

'The descriptions of violence are visceral. Parts could be describing contemporary Afghanistan with only a change of names... indisputably elegant.

Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday