The roads from Jerusalem led to only three places: to Rome, or to the sea, or to the desert.

All that will ever be has already been written long before it happens. Everywhere I walked my fate walked with me, sewn to my feet with red thread. I gave in to the desert, bowing to its mighty voice. It roars when it speaks, it lies to you and convinces you, it steals from you and leaves you without a single word of comfort. The voice that arises out of the silence is something no one can imagine until it is heard. Breathing itself was a miracle when the storms came whirling across the earth. But my eyes were closed against the shifting winds that can blind a person in an instant. They say the truest beauty is in the harshest land and that God can be found there by those with open eyes. Now our house was the house of the desert, black at night, brutally white at noon. We were nomads, leaving behind beds and belongings, rugs and brass pots.

The person I’d once been vanished as I wrapped myself in white when the dust rose into clouds. In that time I lost all I might have possessed if Jerusalem had not fallen: a husband, a family, a future of my own. We had been wandering for so long I forgot what it was like to live within walls or sleep through the night. In a time when there was nothing but death, we were grateful for anything, and most grateful of all when we awoke to another day. All are dovekeepers, and all are also keeping secrets-about who they are, where they come from, who fathered them, and whom they love. The lives of these four complex and fiercely independent women intersect in the desperate days of the siege. Shirah, born in Alexandria, is wise in the ways of ancient magic and medicine, a woman with uncanny insight and power. Aziza is a warrior’s daughter, raised as a boy, a fearless rider and expert marksman who finds passion with a fellow soldier. Revka, a village baker’s wife, watched the murder of her daughter by Roman soldiers she brings to Masada her young grandsons, rendered mute by what they have witnessed. Yael’s mother died in childbirth, and her father, an expert assassin, never forgave her for that death. Based on this tragic and iconic event, Hoffman’s novel is a spellbinding tale of four extraordinarily bold, resourceful, and sensuous women, each of whom has come to Masada by a different path. According to the ancient historian Josephus, two women and five children survived. Nearly two thousand years ago, nine hundred Jews held out for months against armies of Romans on Masada, a mountain in the Judean desert. The Dovekeepers is “striking….Hoffman grounds her expansive, intricately woven, and deepest new novel in biblical history, with a devotion and seriousness of purpose” ( Entertainment Weekly).

An ambitious and mesmerizing novel from the bestselling author of Rules of Magic.

Faithful by alice hoffman summary