BOOK OF THE YEAR 2012 Bronze Medal, Historical Fiction, ForeWord Reviews "A compelling what-if story about a human, approachable Jesus." --- Kirkus Reviews "An intriguing notion of what might have happened." --- Publishers Weekly "This novel has it all--bullies, forbidden romance, friendship, rivalries, brutal battles, gladiators and the triumph of good over evil." - Tallahassee Democrat The Bastard is a thoroughly researched, action-driven, dark epic about the missing decades in the life of Jesus. The novel realistically portrays a human Jesus as an outcast character caught in a clash of cultures during an age of brutality and violence. In the novel, Jesus escapes his bullied childhood in Nazareth by becoming a stable boy who travels with the Roman cavalry to Germania. He rises to become a mounted medicus and, finally, a gladiator, before rejecting violence and returning to Judea as a healer. The love between Jesus and Mary Magdalene is central to this tale of awakening and redemption through the terrible path of hardship and bloodshed. The story is controversial, but not gratuitously so. It seriously explores the events that transformed Jesus from a child of the 1st-century Jewish social order, with its Law commanding "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, fracture for fracture," into a teacher of peace, with unheard-of ideas about forgiveness and non-retaliation.