Reading Between the Lines

A Note on the Series

Reading Between the Lines is a literary anthology of historical fiction drawn from scripture, apocryphal texts, and sacred tradition. Each book recovers the interior life of a figure the official record needed to keep simple or symbolic — a woman, a doubter, a betrayer, a thief — and asks what it might have felt like to be that person from the inside.

The stories are fiction, not argument. They do not claim to correct theology or rewrite history. What they claim is the novelist’s oldest right: to imagine what the record cannot tell us, to inhabit the silence that surrounds every historical life, and to find there — in the gaps between what was written down and what was actually lived — something that feels true.

The source material for each book is drawn from canonical scripture, Gnostic and apocryphal texts, rabbinic tradition, archaeological scholarship, and the long silence of figures who were present at events the tradition recorded from other angles. Where sources conflict, the novel chooses the version that serves the character’s interior life most honestly. Where sources are silent, the novel imagines.

Each book in the series stands alone. No prior knowledge of theology, scripture, or any other volume in the series is required. What is required is only a willingness to slow down, to inhabit an ancient consciousness, and to consider that the people at the center of the most enduring stories ever told were, before they were symbols, simply human beings trying to understand what had happened to them.

East of the Garden: The Book of Eve is the first.