Sign-In
Cart
The Tower of Fish: A Novel of Mary Magdalene
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Mar 16 2026
Pages: 246
Weight: 0.74
Height: 0.52 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Miriam of Magdala is sixty-five years old, sitting in a cave on a mountain in Provence, writing the account the official record left out.
Born the daughter of a fish merchant in the city of Magdala - Migdal, the Tower - she grows up beside a lake that teaches her to pay attention. She marries, is widowed, and spends two years in the grip of what she calls her seven demons: Grief, Shame, Rage, Loneliness, Pride, Desire, and the last and quietest one, Despair. Then a teacher from Nazareth comes to read in the synagogue, reads Isaiah as though the ink is still wet, and something in her shifts. She leaves Magdala on a Friday morning and doesn't look back.
What follows is five years at the center of one of history's most consequential movements - financing it, organizing it, witnessing it with the full precision of everything she has. She forms deep bonds with the other women: Yohanna, the politically astute wife of Herod's steward; Susanna, who records the teachings in secret; Marta, whose groundedness is itself a theology. And she falls into the most important relationship of her life - with the teacher himself - a love that is real, unconsummated, and more theologically interesting for both.
She is there at the anointing in Bethany, where she pours expensive nard over his feet and he says: she has done a beautiful thing, and it will be remembered wherever this story is told. She is there at Golgotha, standing where the twelve men are not. She is there at dawn in the garden - the tomb empty, the burial cloth folded - when a man says her name in the only voice that has ever said it exactly that way, and she understands what she is looking at.
She goes back and tells them. The room goes carefully, specifically silent.
In the decades that follow she watches the movement become an institution and herself edged out of it - not with malice, but with the automatic efficiency of a world returning to the shape it knew before. She crosses the Mediterranean in a rudderless boat, spends eight years teaching on the Provençal coast, buries Marta under an inferior fig tree. Then she climbs a mountain, enters a cave, and does the one thing she was always going to do: writes the whole truth down, from the beginning, in the language of the lake.
The novel you are holding is that document.
The Tower of Fish is a love story, a witness account, and a reclamation - the story of the most important eyewitness in Western history, given her own voice at last.
For readers of The Red Tent, Gilead, and The Testament of Mary.
Also from
Holder, Joseph
Hiroshima: Paper Cranes and Ashes: A Novel of Love, War, and Survival in the Shadow of the Atomic Bomb
Holder, Joseph
Paperback
Also in
Historical Fiction
James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales Vol. 1 (Loa #26): The Pioneers / The Last of the Mohicans / The Prairie
Cooper, James Fenimore
Hardcover
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
The Pirate Queen: A Novel from the New York Times Bestselling Author of the Frozen River
Lawhon, Ariel
Hardcover
The Moonlight Runner: A Gripping Historical Novel of Survival, Bravery, and Romance
Robards, Karen
Hardcover
The Amalfi Curse: A Bewitching Tale of Sunken Treasure, Forbidden Love, and Ancient Magic on the Amalfi Coast
Penner, Sarah
Paperback
The Pirate Queen: A Novel from the New York Times Bestselling Author of the Frozen River (Large Print Edition)
Lawhon, Ariel
Paperback
A Pair of Aces: Reese's Book Club (Large Print Edition)
Murray, Victoria Christopher
Benedict, Marie
Paperback
Murder on the Orient Express: A Hercule Poirot Mystery: The Official Authorized Edition
Christie, Agatha
Paperback