The Book of Heaven: A Novel

From the author of the classic travel memoir Dinner with Persephone, an accomplished poet, and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, here is an eagerly anticipated, stunningly original novel of heartrending lyricism about four women, a fierce mythopoeia that invites us to enter into a new and powerful imagination of the sublime: What if “a woman’s point of view” were God’s?
 
As The Book of Heaven commences, Eve speaks about what is alleged to have happened in the Garden of Eden, a story she hardly recognizes. She tells her version of events, revealing that the constellations we are accustomed to seeing above conceal heavens with which we have yet to contend. In the four parts of the novel—The Book of Souraya, The Book of Savour, The Book of Rain, The Book of Sheba—and their accompanying proverbs, Eve accounts for four new zodiacs and teaches us how to view each and comprehend its centrality to women: a knife, a cauldron for cooking, a paradisiacal garden, lovers embracing. Each book keenly evokes the life of a woman newly freed from the old tales in which she was trapped: a metamorphosis of Sarah, Abraham’s wife; a polytheistic cook; Job’s wife; and the Queen of Sheba.
 
In The Book of Heaven, Patricia Storace has brilliantly and radically reimagined the worlds of these women, putting them in the foreground of their stories and of the so-called Old Testament itself.