Synopses & Reviews
Sunday's Silence takes place in a hidden and untamed American landscape, seemingly forgotten by God but filled with a mystical fervor for miracles. In this beguiling world of Appalachian snake handlers, Iranian-born novelist Gina Nahai reaches new storytelling heights, weaving a tapestry of love, shame, death, and the power of faith.
After twenty years in flight from his roots, international journalist Adam Watkins is finally going home to Knoxville, Tennessee. His father, Little Sam, notorious leader of a snake-handling cult called Holiness Church, has been murdered. The suspect, Sister Blue Kerdi, is a fiery-haired, purple-eyed beauty with a reputation for being immune to earthly harm. When Blue and Adam meet, the attraction is immediate, and the current that courses between them is at once dark and exhilarating. Born in Iraq, Blue is a Kurd whose journey to America's backwoods has all the mythic, seductive qualities of one of Scheherazade's tales. Interwoven with Adam's own quest, Blue's story comes to life in indelible images and mesmerizing prose.
Sunday's Silence, named one of the "Best Books of 2001" by The Los Angeles Times, powerfully depicts the triumph of passion over reason, the cross-cultural sympathies of fundamentalism, and the price of extremism.
Review
Chicago Tribune A bold, passionate tale of fanaticism and seduction. Sensitively and vividly rendered. Exotic, mythic, a tale told by a Scheherazade.
Review
San Francisco Chronicle Sunday's Silence is exactly the kind of book that Americans need to be reading right now, a book in which East and West collide, not only in war but in love.
Review
Los Angeles Times Exquisite....Nahai is especially adroit in her storytelling...Because [she] is not interested in sensationalizing....extreme religious notions, Sunday's Silence demands that we pay them attention and lets us understand a little bit better their powerful lure.
Synopsis
East meets West in acclaimed author Gina B. Nahai's mesmerizing story of a journalist on a search for the truth about his father's death -- and his own past -- among the mystical, snake-handling Holy Rollers of Appalachia. When Adam Watkins, illegitimate son of ninety-year-old preacher Little Sam Jenkins, learns that his father has died from a snakebite and that a woman named Blue, a fellow handler, is being charged with murder, Adam abandons his assignment in Lebanon and goes home for the first time in twenty years. Almost immediately, he is drawn into a dark and exhilarating relationship with the purple-eyed beauty Blue. Carried to Appalachia from the mountains of Asia as the child bride of a languages professor, she is both outsider and enigma. Through Blue's and Adam's interwoven stories, Nahai brings to life a land of stunning beauty and heartrending poverty and explores both the triumph of passion over reason and the cross-cultural mysteries of faith.
About the Author
Gina B. Nahai is the author of the bestselling Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith and Cry of the Peacock. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California.