A world on the brink of catastrophe.
A two thousand year old mystery.
A lost gospel.

Seeking adventure, a young man flees the drudgery of shop keeping in Tsarist Russia to make a new life among the bohemians and revolutionaries of 19th century Paris. Travelling undercover in the mountains of British India, he discovers a manuscript that transforms the world's understanding of the historical Jesus. Decades later, in a Europe threatened by unimaginable tragedy, he makes a despairing attempt to right a historic injustice.

This breathtaking novel by the award-winning author of Far North and Strange Bodies tells the extraordinary tale of Nicolas Notovitch and his secret gospel.

It is the epic story of a young man on the make in a turbulent world of spies and double-cross, propaganda and revolutionary violence, lost love and nascent anti-Semitism -a world which eerily foreshadows our own era of post-truth politics.

Based on real events, THE SECRET BOOKS is at once a page-turning adventure and an examination of the stories that humans are willing to kill and die for.

 

Marcel Theroux is a writer and broadcaster. He was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1968. He grew up in England, studied English Literature at Cambridge University and International Relations at Yale, where he specialized in Soviet and East European Studies. He has published five novels to critical acclaim. His second novel, THE PAPERCHASE, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His fourth novel, FAR NORTH (2009) was a finalist for the U.S. National BookAward, the Arthur C Clarke Award, and was awarded the Prix de l’Inaperçu in 2011. FAR NORTH has been translated into German, Dutch, and French. A Japanese edition prepared by the celebrated novelist Haruki Murakami was published in April 2012. Theroux’s fifth novel, STRANGE BODIES, was published by Faber and Faber in the United Kingdom and Ireland in May 2013 and by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US in February 2014.