by Tucker Malarkey

Set in Cairo during the tumultuous aftermath of World War II, Tucker Malarkey's Resurrection draws on the actual events surrounding the findings of the lost gospels at Nag Hammadi, Egypt. Suppressed by the Church Fathers, who elected to include only four gospels in the New Testament canon, these sacred texts were destroyed in ancient times by Church mandate, and their subsequent accidental rediscovery in the 1940s was fraught with danger. Around these remarkable events, Malarkey has crafted a suspenseful and eye-opening tale of love, war, and murder.

When Gemma Bastian's father, a renowned British archeologist, suddenly passes away in Egypt, she journeys from postwar London to Cairo to bury his ashes. Yet her investigation into his last project-an attempt to recover and make public the lost Gnostic Gospels-raises troubling questions about his death. What unfolds is a tantalizing but little-known story about one of the most important and controversial finds of the past century, involving, at its center, the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

Drawing on the material that Elaine Pagels presented in her bestseller The Gnostic Gospels, Resurrection grapples with the mysterious circumstances surrounding the discovery of those ancient texts, which call into question the founding of Christianity and the role of women in Church history. Here is a story of resurrection in its many forms: of a dead father, of a love between a man and a woman, of a world ravaged by war, of a faith that might have been.