Coming Soon · A Novel
a novel of Mary Magdalene by Faith Elaine
The earliest gospels did not name her for a fishing town. They named her the Tower-ess.
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THE TOWER
A Novel of Mary Magdalene
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The Book
Salt whitens the nets along the Magdala shore, and Mary counts her silver by lamplight while the lake breathes against the dock. Her blue linen costs more than a fisherman earns in a season. Her name opens doors from the fish markets of Magdala to the colonnades of Tiberias. Still she wakes before dawn with a hollow under her ribs that no ledger fills.
A teacher from Nazareth walks her shoreline, and the hollow finds a voice. Mary follows him out of Magdala with her purse, her questions, and her stubborn pride. She learns a hard arithmetic: silver buys respect, love earns it, and the two never weigh the same.
The road to Jerusalem will take everything the salt trade gave her and hand back a name no coin could buy. Walk the Galilee beside her. Smell the brine, weigh the silver, and stand in the garden at first light, the tomb open and the linen lying empty.
They called her the Tower-ess: the woman who stayed when the ashes ran, who carried word of the empty tomb when no one else would. This is the story of how she became the Tower.
For readers who loved The Red Tent and The Book of Longings. Historical fiction that sets you on the first-century shore and refuses to let a woman be reduced to the worst thing ever said about her.
Read the opening chapter free: step inside The Tower.
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Behind the Book
It is a story first. The Tower is written to set you on the Magdala shore and keep you there, inside one woman's days, her work, her losses, and her nerve.
The world is real. Magdala was a thriving fishing and dye town on the Sea of Galilee, and the idea that Mary of Magdala was a fallen woman arrived centuries after she lived. The research behind the novel is grounded in that record.
Underneath the story sit questions worth carrying: who gets remembered, who gets rewritten, and what it costs a woman to keep her own name. You feel them rather than get taught them.
About the Author
Faith Elaine is a practicing occupational therapist and doctoral candidate who has spent her career watching how real people actually change. Her fiction is what happens when twenty years of clinical insight demands a story big enough to hold it.
She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, a small pack of corgis, and a barnyard of goats and chickens who remain unimpressed by deadlines.
For Book Clubs
The Tower is built for the long conversation after the last page: a discussion guide, historical notes on Magdala, and reading-group extras will be ready at publication.
Book clubs on the reader list receive the guide first, along with an invitation to bring their questions to the author.
The Reader List
Cover reveal, first excerpt, publication date, and early reader copies. Everything reaches the list before it reaches anyone else.
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