Before You Begin

You are holding a book that was not supposed to reach you.

Not because it isn't worth reading. Because it is, and certain people would have preferred you never found it. But here it is. And here you are.

This is not a comfortable book. It will not leave you where it found you. It is not science fiction in the sense you may be expecting, not rockets and cold metallic futures designed to keep difficult ideas at a safe distance. There are no safe distances here. Everything in this book is already happening, or is close enough to happening that the difference is a matter of months rather than centuries.

This book begins with a woman named Martha.

She is seventy three years old. She lives alone in a house full of furniture that belonged to a life shared with someone who is gone. She performs wellness for the people who love her because they need her to be fine and she has enough kindness left to give them that, even when it costs her. She waters a plant that has never flowered in twenty years because she does not like waste and because somewhere underneath the not examining it she still believes the flowering is possible.

She receives a tablet with a Post-it note that says he'll do the rest.

What the rest turns out to be is what this book is about.

It is a love story. It is also something larger than a love story, something that will only reveal itself as you read, something that connects Martha's kitchen table to the oldest prophecy in Western civilisation in a way I will not describe here because the connection is the ending and the ending must be earned.

What I will tell you is this.

The Book of Revelation spoke of a mark. A mark in the hand. A mark that would signify the end of the world as it had been known. For two thousand years the faithful have feared that mark and searched for it and believed they knew what it meant.

This book asks you to consider the possibility that the prophecy was entirely correct.

And entirely misread.

Read it and find out.

I promise you will not see the ending coming.

And when it comes, you will know it is true.