Asia Minor, mid-first century. In a well-to-do house in Colossae, a young slave - keeper of his master's keys - opens the doors one dawn and disappears with the family's money. His flight takes him into the forests of Phrygia, where a band of fugitives takes him in as one of their own. Within two years, his ambushes along the imperial roads turn him into legend. Merchants call him the Terror of Phrygia. Centurions are ordered to take him alive.

When a dawn raid in a closed forest ends his reign, he is thrown in chains into a Roman cell beside an old Jewish man who dictates letters to his visitors. The young man refuses to listen. The old man speaks anyway. And one night he hands him a small papyrus with precise instructions: carry it back to the house in Colossae, place it in the hands of the master he fled, and wait for whatever the master decides.

Inside is written his name.
Inside is written his sentence.
Inside is written, too, something else.

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Letter of Grace is the story behind Paul's shortest epistle: a novel about flight and return, about the weight of the names the world fastens on us and the names that grace gives back, and about what a three-hundred-word papyrus can hold when everything else has finished falling.