John
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- 14,99 €
Descrição da editora
What invisible drama plays, what passes to and fro in the columns of air above them, none knows, but the disciples think: perhaps the time is arrived at last.Aged, blind and perilously frail, John the Apostle has walked ten thousand miles to tell of love. In a hundred years he has lived to witness sights and scenes that now cloud his mind. Of his followers, there are few remaining, banished with him to an island where they wait as storm clouds whip the island with rain. They wait for the world to free them from exile. They wait for signs that seem like they will never come. But eventually a sign does come and together the disciples leave the island. They embark on a journey that will change their lives forever: a journey filled with purpose and fear which will test their belief - in love and in each other - to breaking point, and John must face his biggest battle yet.John depicts the inner life of a man of faith and doubt with extraordinary poetic vision. Romantic, wild and passionate, this is the story of what it might be to love for a lifetime.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With plenty of imagination and occasionally grandiloquent prose, Williams (Four Letters of Love) pens the last days of the Apostle John, the beloved disciple of Jesus who, tradition says, wrote the wild, apocalyptic book of Revelation as well as the Gospel and Epistles of John. The story begins as John, blind and nearly 100 years old, lives banished on the Island of Patmos where he once received his portentous vision. Surrounded by doubting disciples of his own who pepper him with questions about Christ's return and speak heresy, John remembers his time with Jesus. Williams's present tense narration lends urgency as he interweaves dark and sometimes grotesquely violent threads throughout his story. He beautifully portrays the Christ-followers' loneliness as they yearn for the return of their Messiah and despair at the reception of the Christian message. Some of Williams's prose is fresh and elegant ("a bright wind hammers silver out of the sea"); at other times it is confusing ("the trader unsnaps dogs of curses"). The second half of the book loses momentum, but offers interesting conjectures about the explosion of dissenting beliefs after Jesus' death and how people of the time might have responded. This novel will appeal to readers who like imaginative and gritty sagas of the lives of key Christians in the early church as well as those who value lyricism.
