Julia and the Heathens in Heaven: (Bahetene)
On the third floor of a narrow brick rowhouse, Julia watches the street through a curtain she never opens more than a hand's width. Below her, the world goes on without her - the newlyweds, the laughing young men upstairs, the single mother, the music rising through the floorboards. Julia calls them all bahetene. Heathens. For forty-five years she has built a fortress of her own holiness, brick by patient brick, certain that her loneliness is a kind of grace and that everyone warmer than herself is bound for hell.
A thousand miles south, a sister still sets a place for her at the table every night, and sends a card every December that is never answered.
Then a quiet, attentive man takes the room across the landing, and for the first time in her life someone is listening. What he offers feels like being seen at last. It has another name - and when Julia learns it, she will face the one choice her whole life was built to make impossible.
Julia and the Heathens in Heaven is an unsparing, tender portrait of piety turned to armor, and of the wanting that will not die no matter how deep it is buried, or how tightly the door is welded shut.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
