SARIAH: The First Fire (The Buried and the Kept)

By Matthew I. Hughes

Scripture gives her a handful of verses.

A departure, a complaint, a testimony, two sons born in the wilderness, a sickbed on the great waters. This is the rest of her - the life the record could only carry as a name: and his mother, Sariah. Jerusalem, before the fall: a scribe's granddaughter learns her letters in secret on a rooftop, watches a dead king carried home from Megiddo, and marries a young trader with a listening face who pays too much for everything he has decided to love. When the fire on the rock finally speaks to him, she walks out of the world with a coal from her mother's hearth in a clay pot - fed and guarded and breathed upon across a wilderness that wants it dead and a sea that wants it drowned. From the night the blood comes home on her son's hands to the murmuring the record kept and the answer it almost didn't; from the lion her two boys killed together to the sentence that finally divides them; from the years God rationed fire itself to the storm that asks the unvisited woman, at the sill of death, the only question of her life - this is the mother of nations in her own voice: clerk, keeper, bride, accuser, witness - telling her life into the last fire she will ever bank.

Book 1 of The Buried and the Kept, and the door to the library. She asked her son to write her in. This book is the rest of the keeping: no one should have to live, or die, unseen.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HJ12Y3Q8
• ISBN13: 9798951321947
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: M. Hughes Books
• Length: 334 Pages
• Weight: 0.89 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.8" x 5.5"