Perhaps the best Biblical fiction book of the year: "Land of Silence" by Tessa Afshar

about the book...

Before Christ called her daughter . . .

Before she stole healing by touching the hem of his garment . . .

Elianna is a young girl crushed by guilt. After her only brother is killed while in her care, Elianna tries to earn forgiveness by working for her father’s textile trade and caring for her family. When another tragedy places Elianna in sole charge of the business, her talent for design brings enormous success, but never the absolution she longs for. As her world unravels, she breaks off her betrothal to the only man she will ever love. Then illness strikes, isolating Elianna from everyone, stripping everything she has left.

No physician can cure her. No end is in sight. Until she hears whispers of a man whose mere touch can heal. After so many years of suffering and disappointment, is it possible that one man could redeem the wounds of body . . . and soul?

my review...

Tessa Afshar has long been one of my favourite authors, and so I met the news of her latest novel, "Land of Silence", with excitement. And let me tell you that this novel certainly lived up to my expectations! I have long been fascinated by the Biblical account of Jesus healing the woman who had been bleeding for 12 years, but I've never spent much time thinking about how she came to the place of reaching out in the crowd to touch Jesus' cloak, desperate for a healing. Afshar has succeeded at bringing this woman's story to life in a mesmerizing way, using her gift of fiction to craft "what could have been" in such a way that I couldn't put the story down. Instead, I was moved to tears more than once as I walked alongside the broken character of Elianna, feeling her pain as she experienced rejection and hardship, making her encounter with Jesus all the more beautiful. I never before realized that the only time Jesus refers to someone as "daughter" is with this woman, and I can only imagine how that felt to this woman to hear those words and what change she experienced not only in feeling healing enter her body, but her soul as well. Afshar has created a truly remarkable character in Elianna, and I can say with confident that this is one of those books that I will be reading over again in the future.

If you have never yet had the privilege of reading a book by Afshar, then I encourage you to start at once by picking up a copy of Land of Silence for yourself. You will walk away with a deeper appreciation for what Jesus did when he healed this woman, and will have been blessed to have read such a wonderfully written story. 5 out of 5 stars.

An egalley has been provided courtesy of the publisher, Tyndale, for the purposes of this unbiased review.

about the author...

Tessa Afshar was voted "New Author of the Year" by the Family Fiction sponsored Reader's Choice Awards 2011 for her novel Pearl in the Sand. Her book, Harvest of Rubies was nominated for the 2013 ECPA Book Award in the fiction category and World Magazine chose Harvest of Rubies as one of four notable books of the year. Her novel, Harvest of Gold was nominated for the 2014 Christy Award. Tessa was born in Iran to a nominally Muslim family, and lived there for the first fourteen years of her life. She moved to England where she survived boarding school for girls and fell in love with Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, before moving to the United States permanently. Her conversion to Christianity in her twenties changed the course of her life forever. Tessa holds an MDiv from Yale University where she served as cochair of the Evangelical Fellowship at the Divinity School. She has spent the last fifteen years in full-time Christian service in New England.

Buy now from Amazon...

http://amzn.to/1W2gLtG