Joyous Bliss

By Balthasar Basileia and Edgar Mark Sotomayor

Her father named her Joyous. The nurse asked twice.
"Is that a family name, sir?"
"No, ma'am. It's a prophecy."
She was seven the night two officers took their hats off at the door on 148th Street. That night, alone with her father's Bible open across her knees, something came into the room that she had no words for - so she used the only ones she had. Somebody is in here with me.
Eight years later her mother remarries a decent, generous millionaire, and Joyous Bliss passes through a four-foot stone wall into a town where nothing is broken, nothing is lacking, and nothing is at stake. A house with a name. A school with a Latin motto nobody can translate. A church service that runs twenty-two minutes, where in four years she never once sees a grown person weep.
She is fifteen years old when God shows her the nations.
But the mission field is not the mansions.
At ten minutes to six every morning, in a mud room among other people's coats, a housekeeper from Guatemala has been praying for a village two thousand miles away - eleven feet below the bedroom where a rich girl lies asleep.
The nations were already inside the wall. They had been there the whole time.
Spanning seven decades and five continents, Joyous Bliss follows a woman who gave up marriage to keep an undivided call, who spent thirty years asking people to stop using a certain word about her, and who was buried out of the same small church in Queens that buried her father - with four blocks closed to traffic and delegations from forty-one nations standing in the road.
A novel about grief, obscene comfort, the people we look at every day and never see, and a God who does not waste an address.
Beauty for ashes. The whole of it paid out.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HH76X1KC
• ISBN13: 9798170801589
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 100 Pages
• Weight: 0.29 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"