Product Description

Set in Cairo during the tumultuous aftermath of World War II, Tucker Malarkey's Resurrection draws on the actual events surrounding the findings of the lost gospels at Nag Hammadi, Egypt. Suppressed by the Church Fathers, who elected to include only four gospels in the New Testament canon, these sacred texts were destroyed in ancient times by Church mandate, and their subsequent accidental rediscovery in the 1940s was fraught with danger. Around these remarkable events, Malarkey has crafted a suspenseful and eye-opening tale of love, war, and murder.

When Gemma Bastian's father, a renowned British archeologist, suddenly passes away in Egypt, she journeys from postwar London to Cairo to bury his ashes. Yet her investigation into his last project-an attempt to recover and make public the lost Gnostic Gospels-raises troubling questions about his death. What unfolds is a tantalizing but little-known story about one of the most important and controversial finds of the past century, involving, at its center, the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

Drawing on the material that Elaine Pagels presented in her bestseller The Gnostic Gospels, Resurrection grapples with the mysterious circumstances surrounding the discovery of those ancient texts, which call into question the founding of Christianity and the role of women in Church history. Here is a story of resurrection in its many forms: of a dead father, of a love between a man and a woman, of a world ravaged by war, of a faith that might have been.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #698695 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

From Publishers Weekly
A temperate entry in the rapidly overheating Da Vinci Code sweepstakes, Malarkey's second novel (following An Obvious Enchantment) illuminates the spiritual yearnings underlying and bolstering that boffo megaseller's more sensationalistic elements. Set in Egypt just after WWII, the novel fictionalizes the discovery of the Gnostic gospels, early Christian writings whose explosive intimations—that a growing nonauthoritarian sect was suppressed as Christianity was incorporated into the Roman empire—have been expertly explored by the great scholar Elaine Pagels. Malarkey, a founding editor of Tin House, is clearly enamored of these writings, but she makes a hash of the intrigue around their discovery. A faulty sense of period (a character at one point anachronistically calls for "security") and characters and situations straight from romance fiction ("This is the most beautiful part of the horse, and, I think, some women") mix uneasily with fairly sophisticated Bible readings, as young Brit Gemma Bastian follows her archeologist father to Cairo and gets mixed up with the household of his friend David Lazar—and David's sons. Such criticisms would be quibbles if Resurrection possessed the pulpy energy of Da Vinci, but it doesn't. Budding Gnostics and Essenes would be better off going straight to Pagels. (Aug.)
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From Booklist
Like The Da Vinci Code, Marlakey's novel professes to find the hidden meaning of Christianity buried behind deceptive orthodoxies. But here the secret comes from the ancient gnostic Gospels recovered from Nag Hammadi, Egypt, shortly after World War II. The sleuth who uncovers the Gospels, Gemma Basian, comes to Egypt to bury the remains of her archaeologist father, who has died in Cairo under suspicious circumstances._As Gemma investigates her father's death, she finds herself increasingly drawn into the mysteries that drew him to the land of Isis. The gnostic Gospels he finally discovers before his death reveal to him--and then to Gemma--everything he had been looking for: individual salvation without a church, sexual ecstasy rather than celibacy, Egyptian magic rather than Hebrew morality. The gnostic Gospels also accord women a much larger role than the New Testament, identifying Mary Magdalene as Jesus' lover and as the apostle first vouchsafed a vision of the Resurrection. The recovered words of gnostic scripture thus reconnect Gemma with her murdered father--and embolden her in challenging a society long darkened by ecclesiastical conspiracy. Although some readers may enjoy Malarkey's novel simply as a literary thriller, many will find themselves wrestling with theological conundrums. In fact, controversy will surely surround this novel, as readers who hail it as a daring expose clash with those who see it as a slander against their faith. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
...an elegantly written thriller. -- People, July 10, 2006

...an elegantly written thriller. -- People, July 10, 2006

Although some readers may enjoy Malarkey's novel simply as a literary thriller, many will find themselves wrestling with theological conundrums. -- Booklist, July 2006

Investigating her father's mysterious death in post-WW2 Cairo, a young woman finds herself on the trail of the Lost (Gnostic) Gospels; there is also a flickering love interest in this second novel from Malarkey (An Obvious Enchantment, 2000). Gemma Bastian is a nurse in London. She lost her mother in the Blitz; then her father, an archaeologist, left for Egypt. Now it's 1947, and Gemma is off to Cairo herself; her father has died of a heart attack, and she will stay with his friends. David Lazar is an Englishman; his second wife is Egyptian; his children are half-brothers. There's Michael (a morphine addict, drowning in self-pity because of his injuries as a fighter pilot) and Anthony (another archaeologist, calm, aloof); Gemma will spar and flirt with the still-sexy Michael while she pushes Anthony for information on her father's research. He had achieved a breakthrough and was expecting money before being found dead in his office after his client, a British Museum official, was killed by a rock slide. It smells bad. Who is the ginger-haired guy she surprises in her father's office? Why is he following her? And why is Anthony stonewalling? Gemma is her father's daughter, a smart, fearless loner, and realizes her father had unearthed one of the Lost Gospels (as a young man, he had left the seminary after a similar discovery). Sinister machinations by the Catholic church; the elevation of Mary Magdalene-yes, there are some similarities to The Da Vinci Code here. But Malarkey assures us that her many gospel quotations are authentic (and credits The Gnostic Gospels, by Elaine Pagels). Her mix of shattering scriptural revelations and skullduggery should be combustible, but the fire never catches. The murders (four, at least) generate little excitement (this is Egypt; stuff happens) and the sheer number of different gospels in circulation becomes confusing. All this, and the bombing of Cairo by the Israelis? It's way too much. Passable entertainment; could have been much better. (Kirkus Reviews)

a provocative mystery-a story of love and murder that calls into question the founding of Christianity... --Pages Magazine, July/August 2006

Although some readers may enjoy Malarkey's novel simply as a literary thriller, many will find themselves wrestling with theological conundrums. -- Booklist, July 2006

a provocative mystery-a story of love and murder that calls into question the founding of Christianity... -- Pages Magazine, July/August 2006

Customer Reviews

Review by Malcolm McAfee (via another acct. S. Allen)
Review of Tucker Malarkey's Resurrection

Malarkey does three things well:

1) She makes clear that the task of each of us is to create the meaning of our lives.

2) She illustrates with the proposition that recent new gospels modify our view of the Christian faith experience.

3) She does this in a convergence of three traditions:

a) The Anglican writers C.S.Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, Tolkien and Charles Williams.

b) The recent genre represented by Dan Brown's DaVinci Code.

c) Factual writers like John McPhee who bring us into Place and Person so convincingly that we cannot distinguish fact and fiction, nor does it matter.

We need Tucker Malarkey's book at the moment to take us on the journey of better experiencing each other and cherishing each other more.

A mesmerizing, thought-provoking read
I loved this book, not only for what I learned, but for how it made me want to know more. It is an amazing and redemptive story -- and worth reading for the writing and the love story alone.

It was almost eery, after reading this novel which explores the complex and capricious way that history is written, to read David Marshall's review attacking Malarkey's facts. The fact is, these "facts" are largely a matter of opinion. There are many Christian schools and many Christian scholars with many points of view. I've read enough of them to know there is no definitive story. Faith is personal and Mr. Marshall, with his protests, shows this clearly enough. How can he simply dismiss Elaine Pagels as "one of the greatest sources of disinformation about early Christianity on the planet?" Like Bishop Iranaeus, he really does protest too much.

A Smart Da Vinci Code
This is a story about greed, ambition, misogyny, and human nature. Set against the confusing clarity of war, this story takes place between the end of WWII and the beginning of the Arab-Israeli Conflict in 1948. British nurse, Gemma Bastian receives two letters from her Egyptologist father. One letter is full of exciting news of riches and the promise of a new home in Egypt, far away from war-torn London, while the other is addressed to both Gemma and a man she has never met. Shortly after receiving those letters she finds out that her father has died under mysterious circumstances. Gemma travels to Egypt to figure out what happened to her father and why mysterious and threatening men seem to be very interested in his findings.

The main plot in the story has to do with the controversial papyri, known as the Gnostic Gospels, found in Egypt, that are believed to be the lost gospels from apostles of Jesus Christ, including the gospels of Mary Magdalene. This is a fictionalized account of how they disappeared and why they remained hidden for nearly 30 years after their discovery. Resurrection purports that the bible is a case of the winners writing history and eliminating ideas that they did not agree with, namely the role of women and the church in religion. Resurrection is a thought provoking page turner that makes you question the nature of organized religion.

Anyone who was interested in the questions raised in the Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, but disappointed by the story, will love Resurrection. This book is what The Da Vinci Code could have been if you took out all of the excessive cross-Europe chases and biblical dynasties. There are no secretive, evil religious organizations. No creepy albino monks lurking about after the main characters. Resurrection is a suspenseful love story peopled with a mix of fictional and historical characters. Tucker Malarkey's characters are a bit wooden, but they are (perhaps inadvertently) secondary to the intriguing religious debate. She has created a wonderful fiction based on the sketchy history of the Gnostic Gospels.