Tucker Malarkey brings us "Resurrection", based on the historical discovery of the Gnostic Gospels in Egypt.
Set in Cairo during the tumultuous aftermath of World War II, Tucker Marlarkey's new novel draws on the actual events surrounding the finding of the lost gospels at Nag Hammadi, Egypt. Suppressed by the Church Fathers, who elected to include only four gospels in the New Testament canon, these sacred texts were destroyed in ancient times by Church mandate, and their subsequent accidental rediscovery in the 1940s was fraught with danger. Around these remarkable events, Malarkey has crafted a suspenseful and eye-opening tale of love, war, and murder.
When Gemma Bastian's father, a renowned British archeologist, suddenly passes away in Egypt, she journeys from postwar London to Cairo to bury his ashes. Yet her investigation into his last project -- an attempt to recover and make public the lost Gnostic Gospels -- raises troubling questions about his death. What unfolds is a tantalizing but little-known story about one of the most important and controversial finds of the past century, involving, at its center, the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
Drawing on the material that Elaine Pagels presented in her bestseller The Gnostic Gospels, "Resurrection" grapples with the mysterious circumstances surrounding the discovery of those ancient texts, which call into question the founding of Christianity and the role of women in Church history. Here is a story of resurrection in its many forms: of a dead father, of a love between a man and a woman, of a world ravaged.
Tucker Malarkey was a founding editor of Tin House, a literary journal based in Portland, Oregon, and New York. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she is a former researcher/writer for The Washington Post.- Cody's Books
Bio
Tucker Malarkey
Tucker Malarkey was raised in San Francisco. She attended Georgetown University and was then hired by the Washington Post where she spent the next four years working on the Foreign Desk and then with columnist Haynes Johnson on the book, "Sleepwalking Through History," a best-selling account of the Reagan years.
Before accepting a magazine job in New York, she decided to go to Africa for three months, visiting an island off the coast of Kenya where there were no cars and only the occasional phone; a place that seemed ideal for figuring out a life plan. The trip that was to last three months lasted two years. Much of the first year was spent on the aforementioned island, where she taught Moslem boys in a broken down school house with dirt floors and decided her life plan would involve writing fiction.
From the island (the setting for An Obvious Enchantment) she traveled to South Africa, where Nelson Mandela had just been released. The country was experiencing a euphoric optimism about the future and Ms. Malarkey stayed on to teach English in the townships outside of Capetown while continuing to support herself with freelance magazine work. Because African countries were then penalizing those who stayed in South Africa longer than two months, Ms. Malarkey was denied re-entry to Kenya. She did not return to the island for five years.
Upon returning to America, she was admitted to the Iowa Writers Workshop where she began a novel for which she received a Michener Grant in 1994. She spent the next few years teaching and working on various literary projects between Portland and New York City, while at work on a second novel. She currently teaches writing workshops in Portland's public school system and is the Editor-at-Large for Tin House magazine, a literary journal based in Portland and New York. She is at work on her third novel.