The Tower of Fish

The Tower of Fish: A Novel of Mary Magdalene

Miriam of Magdala is sixty-five years old, sitting in a cave on a mountain in Provence, writing the account the official record left out.

Born the daughter of a fish merchant in the city of Magdala - Migdal, the Tower - she grows up beside a lake that teaches her to pay attention. She marries, is widowed, and spends two years in the grip of what she calls her seven demons: Grief, Shame, Rage, Loneliness, Pride, Desire, and the last and quietest one, Despair. Then a teacher from Nazareth comes to read in the synagogue, reads Isaiah as though the ink is still wet, and something in her shifts. She leaves Magdala on a Friday morning and doesn't look back.

What follows is five years at the center of one of history's most consequential movements - financing it, organizing it, witnessing it with the full precision of everything she has. She forms deep bonds with the other women: Yohanna, the politically astute wife of Herod's steward; Susanna, who records the teachings in secret; Marta, whose groundedness is itself a theology. And she falls into the most important relationship of her life - with the teacher himself - a love that is real, unconsummated, and more theologically interesting for both.

She is there at the anointing in Bethany, where she pours expensive nard over his feet and he says: she has done a beautiful thing, and it will be remembered wherever this story is told. She is there at Golgotha, standing where the twelve men are not. She is there at dawn in the garden - the tomb empty, the burial cloth folded - when a man says her name in the only voice that has ever said it exactly that way, and she understands what she is looking at.

She goes back and tells them. The room goes carefully, specifically silent.

In the decades that follow she watches the movement become an institution and herself edged out of it - not with malice, but with the automatic efficiency of a world returning to the shape it knew before. She crosses the Mediterranean in a rudderless boat, spends eight years teaching on the Provençal coast, buries Marta under an inferior fig tree. Then she climbs a mountain, enters a cave, and does the one thing she was always going to do: writes the whole truth down, from the beginning, in the language of the lake.

The novel you are holding is that document.

The Tower of Fish is a love story, a witness account, and a reclamation - the story of the most important eyewitness in Western history, given her own voice at last.

For readers of The Red Tent, Gilead, and The Testament of Mary.