Girl Mary

A hauntingly beautiful novel, bringing to life one of history’s most mysterious characters, Mary of Nazareth, as a beautiful, complicated, utterly believable girl in love.

• In a bestselling tradition: Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent, Francois Mauriac’s A Kiss for the Leper, and Orson Scott Card’s Sarah all present biblical themes through the sensibilities of today. Girl Mary will similarly captivate readers of all faiths and backgrounds.

• A great character: For centuries, Mary has been the Virgin—but isn’t she also the ultimate female, whose life and passion have never been told? Girl Mary introduces us to the human girl who beguiled even God with her simplicity. So what exactly is Girl Mary? Answers the author: it’s a love story of biblical proportions.

• Great storytelling: Petru Popescu recounts this epic through the eyes of famous characters. Pontius Pilate, already Rome’s agent in Judea at the time, meets Mary and falls under her spell. Years before the massacre of the innocents, King Herod senses that Mary signals the end of his reign. Other heroes of the scriptures appear in Girl Mary at their very debut in history. Described with surreal accuracy, Judea and Rome become the birthplace of Christianity.

With his empire in crisis, Augustus orders a young Roman spy to fi nd a sign of his divinely inspired power. Concealing his real name, Pontius Pilate enters the Judean desert seeking an unknown miracle. The moment he meets the striking adolescent Mary, he senses that he is in the presence of someone magical.

Mary, vigorous, spiritual, and charming, is a girl like many other teenage girls: full of passions and weaknesses, surrounded by her loving family and her close friends, steeped in the mystic traditions of the Jews — territory that defi es Roman comprehension. The young Pilate isn't wrong in believing that Mary is remarkable. On the verge of blossoming womanhood, Mary's world will soon open to love — and to the miraculous.

Full of mystical realism and set against the lushly reimagined settings of the biblical world, Girl Mary is the love story of the beautiful girl, naïve and yet complicated, who beguiled everyone — even God — with her soulful simplicity, and whose destiny would change civilization in untold ways.

Publishers Weekly

Another entry into the popular biblical-figures-are-just-like-us genre, Popescu's chronicle looks at the life of the Virgin Mary. A hard-working Jewish teenager expelled from Nazareth with her struggling tribe, Mary has become infatuated with a visiting Roman soldier, the handsome Apella (who is, unbeknownst to Mary, Pontius Pilate, a spy for King Herod). Traveling with her rabbi-carpenter father to an artisans' fair, Mary meets a woodcarver named Joseph and is mesmerized. Confused, she journeys alone to the mountain where Joseph lost his family, seeking the counsel of God. Told in flashbacks from Mary and Pontius Pilate's viewpoint, the narrative can be hard to follow for readers without a knowledge of biblical history, though the language is of the modern-but-stilted variety, old-fashioned–sounding but easy to understand. Pocked with prurient details, such as a physician who specializes in lengthening the penis and old women employed to manually verify the virginity of brides-to-be, Romanian author Popescu isn't afraid to examine the violence and profanity of the Bible, but her tale's appeal may be limited to the devout. (Sept.)

Petru Popescu was one of Romania's leading young authors when he immigrated to the United States in 1974. He is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Amazon Beaming and Almost Adam, and the critically acclaimed memoirs The Return and The Oasis. Petru lives in Beverly Hills with his wife and two children. Visit him at www.petrupopescu.com.