When We Saw Him

Capernaum, first-century Galilee. A carpenter's son. A merchant's daughter. And a man from Nazareth eating bread on a harbour wall.

Ezra bar Josiah is thirteen - methodical, quietly observant, and not yet sure what he believes. Mara bat Elias is eleven - perceptive, certain, and already paying attention to things others walk past. When a travelling teacher named Yeshua passes through their town on his way north, neither of them can explain why the encounter stays with them.

But it does.

As the year unfolds - a wedding in Cana where water becomes something else entirely, a miraculous catch that leaves the town's best fishermen kneeling in an empty boat, a man healed in the synagogue in front of everyone - the questions grow harder to ignore. What is happening? Who is this man? And what does it mean that two children from Capernaum keep finding themselves close enough to watch?

Ezra approaches everything with careful logic, convinced that whatever is unfolding is not the kind of thing that happens to people like him. Mara approaches everything with her whole self, certain in ways she can't yet explain, fighting to be taken seriously in a world that keeps telling her she's too much. Neither of them is wrong about what they've seen. Neither of them is ready for what comes next.

When We Saw Him: Book One is drawn from the Gospels and grounded in the history of first-century Jewish life in Galilee - the prayers, the festivals, the fishing boats, the marketplace, and the particular noise of a harbour town on a busy morning. It is also a story about what it feels like to watch something impossible happen and not be able to look away.

Precise in its history, generous in its humour, and luminous in its treatment of the miraculous - for readers aged 10 and up, and every adult who finds themselves unexpectedly moved.

Includes a glossary. First book in the When We Saw Him trilogy.