The Anathemas Q-and-A: What’s the Story in the Novel?

In 1879, Richard Strawn, a Civil War medic disowned by his fellow Quakers, has to come to terms with his daughter Jennifer’s conviction that she was once a fabulous queen and he a king, or concur with his wife, Lucinda, that the girl is hopelessly insane.

Burying his head by day in work and at night at the pubs, he delays the decision, betting that time will either cure Jennifer’s fantasies or soften Lucinda’s intransigence. Then, just when a truce appears to be holding between mother and daughter, nightmarish events erupt. A fire destroys the Philadelphia business Richard manages, and he is accused of arson. He escapes town, drunk and despondent, only to be pursued by a dream in which he is indeed a king, but a cowardly one about to capitulate to a revolting faction.

Lucinda takes advantage of his absence to have Jennifer committed to an asylum. With luck, which materializes as randomly as misfortune, Richard rescues the girl. While recovering, she too has the dream about the revolt, but she, the queen, boldly confronts the rebels and saves their realm. This baffling coincidence eventually leads them to the irresolute 6th-century Byzantine emperor, Justinian, and his profligate empress, Theodora. Compelled by inescapable fascination, father and daughter—sometimes in tandem, sometimes in opposition—set out to discover what binds them to this long-dead royal couple.

But Lucinda, like the black magician who successfully foiled the two in the earlier existence, is never far behind. She is determined to prove that history indeed repeats itself, and there is nothing they can do to stop it.

Meticulously researched in disciplines both outer (academic research, on-site observation)and inner, (meditation, daily journalling adding up to thousands of pages), The Anathemas is founded in history, notably Procopius’s Secret History and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But it is a story first and foremost—a mystery with generous dollops of grotesque Gothic and romantic “magical realism,” a dynamic roller coaster ride that hurls the reader through the action. One enthusiast said it was unlike any novel she’d ever read, a new genre of literature. Another declared it “life changing”.

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