A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom

Palestine

a.d. 1

On the night that I was born, my father, Marinus, left our home while my mother was in labor and, over the eight hours that followed, slaughtered a dozen infant boys, the sons of our neighbors and friends, each one under the age of two years.

He owned four swords, including a pair of gladii and an ornamental sica that had been handed down through three generations of our family, but he chose the smallest weapon in his arsenal, a triangular dagger with a wooden handle and silver blade known as a parazonium, to end each of the babies lives. A ruby jewel of considerable value lay at the center of the quillion, its liquid blush ready to reflect the blood that spilled from the bodies of the children.

A man of duty, he did not hesitate as he marched from door to door, searching each house for hidden nurslings before plunging his knife into the heart of every boy he found, and while mothers screamed in horror and rained curses down upon his head, fathers stood silently in corners, mute and impotent, knowing that if they dared to speak, the blade would surely find its way across their throats before their sentence came to an end. Older siblings trembled in fear as they watched Marinus go about his dark business, soiling themselves, frightened that they, too, were about to face the judgment of the gods for some unspecified crime, but no, once the babe had been dispatched from this world for the next, my father barely glanced in their direction before making his way to the next house, and the next, and the next after that, for there were more babies to discover and more lives to bring to a premature end.

After each murder, he wiped the blade clean on his tunic, the fabric growing increasingly discolored as the sun began to peep over the horizon in the east, a fiery witness to unspeakable crimes, and soon the gray disappeared beneath an incarnadine coat.

Of course, Marinus was not the only man engaged in sanguineous misadventures that night.

John Boyne is the author of twelve novels for adults, six for younger readers, and a collection of short stories. In his native Ireland, he has won three Irish Book Awards and been shortlisted on thirteen separate occasions. He has also won or been shortlisted for a host of international literary awards, including a Stonewall Honor Award and a Lambda Literary Award. A regular participant in international literary festivals, he has also been a member of the jury for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Costa Book Award, and in 2015 he chaired the jury for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His novels have been published in over fifty languages.

Praise for The Heart s Invisible Furies

By turns whimsical and heartbreaking, Boyne s sprawling novel treads Dickensian territory across seven decades of Irish history, ending with a redemption for both a country and a native son. People

Bleak, bittersweet, and Irish to the bone . . . Explore[s] the relationship between Catholicism and patriarchy in midcentury Ireland and beyond. O: The Oprah Magazine

A picaresque, lolloping odyssey for the individual characters and for the nation that confines them . . . The book blazes with anger as it commemorates lives wrecked by social contempt and self loathing. . . . A substantial achievement. The Guardian

Praise for A Ladder to the Sky

A satire of writerly ambition wrapped in a psychological thriller . . . an homage to Patricia Highsmith, Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe, but its execution is entirely Boyne s own. The Washington Post

Boyne s mastery of perspective, last seen in The Heart s Invisible Furies, works beautifully here. . . . So dark it seems almost impossible to enjoy reading A Ladder to the Sky as much as you definitely will enjoy reading it. NPR

Delicious. Vanity Fair

A darkly funny novel that races like a beating heart. People