All 40% Off Sales Final - Not Guaranteed

List $39.98

Written by Simon Mawer - Audio book performed by Graeme Malcolm - Unabridged Fiction - 8 CASSETTES - 10 hours

Publisher, Time Warner Audiobooks (May 2001)

Listen to an audio clip NOTE: You will need RealPlayer Basic to listen. It's FREE !

A literary suspense thriller, a love story, and a reimagining of modern-day Christianity told with brilliant twists and revelations that takes us on a haunting quest for the truth.

A scroll is discovered, buried among the ancient papyri of the Dead Sea. Although fragile and crumbling, the scroll is mostly intact, the faded lines of Koine script still legible. When Father Leo Newman, a priest from Rome, is called to Jerusalem to help decipher the scroll's meaning, he soon discovers that the text appears to be a fifth gospel - one that tells the story of Jesus' life and crucifixion from the point of view of Judas Iscariot. If the scroll is authentic - and if the radical, incendiary story it tells is true - all of Christianity itself will be open to a complete reinterpretation.

Leo is poised on the brink of an abyss, for, while he unravels the mysteries of the scroll, he is also fighting an impossible attraction to a married woman, Madeleine Brewer. Leo's whole life has been held together by the strength of his faith and his intellect, but now the testimony of the Judas scroll and the desires that make him human threaten to throw his entire vocation into question. At the same time, images of his mother's passionate and tragic affair in wartime Rome are coming back to haunt him, stories of love and betrayal that may undermine his beliefs just as deeply as the Gospel of Judas.

Including fascinating details of papyrus science as well as vivid evocations of Vatican Rome and the holy city of Jerusalem, Simon Mawer expertly weaves together a dramatic narrative that spans two thousand years across Europe and the Middle East in poetic, illuminating prose. Like Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, The Gospel of Judas is a mesmerizing story of the past told in pieces. Like Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, it deals profoundly with questions of faith and what it means to believe. And like Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, The Gospel of Judas is an intellectual puzzle, threaded and embedded with codes and signs.

About the Author: live in Italy, indeed I have lived there for over two decades now, and I'm married with a son and a daughter. I suppose those facts must define me in some way. I love Italy and have written about it directly in A Place in Italy, published in UK in 1992, and set two of my novels partly in the country - Chimera, my first novel (1989), and now The Gospel of Judas. Italy has given me, or at least nurtured in me, a strong sense of history: the effect of history on the present and following that, the effect of personal history---memory and experience---in the life of an individual. But I am not a historian by training; I'm a biologist, and have taught biology for thirty years now. It was with the biology of genetics that my last novel Mendel's Dwarf dealt.

Then there is my family. Most of the families I write about are dysfunctional, but my own family is assuredly not. I have a marvellous wife, who holds down a full time job as well as doing all the things that a mother does, and a son who is now working in Germany, and a daughter who does what most daughters of fifteen do. Perhaps the greatest gift that my family, and my wife in particular, have given me is support and security. They have never complained. When so much of a writer's free time is spent sitting in front of a computer keyboard rather than contributing directly to family life, that means a great deal. They've never complained about those lost weekends and they've always followed my writing career with interest and tolerance (especially on the part of my son, who found himself turned into a daughter on the jacket flap of one of my books) and without them I would have written much less. Or much more. Who knows?