Light from the Ancients: A Novel

Weaving the historical into the personal, LIGHT FROM THE ANCIENTS is a meditation on U.S. foreign policy, parenthood, and improbable love.

It is late summer 2001. Professor Rifaat al-Muheiddin of the London School of Economics is a wanted man in the Middle East. Laila, his teenage sister, blazes up the club scene in London. Nico, the daughter of a former U.S. ambassador, keeps a ghost in her mind in New York’s Upper West Side: she believes that the injustice her late father had suffered in the hands of the U.S. government had led to his early demise.

A clear, beautiful morning in the Big Apple brings death and destruction upon the World Trade Center. The event leads Nico to London, where she meets the professor and Laila.

But the city of Big Ben is anything but serene a year after September 11, and as the drums of war beat yet again…

The three friends navigate the British capital convulsing in fashionable anti-Americanism, the rise of Islamists, and the shadow of what they all fear—the clash of civilizations—until destiny brings about the shocking death of one of them.