A Soul's Journey

There exists an arrangement older than any religion, any empire, any language yet devised by the tongues of men. It is this: that a soul enters a body at the moment of first breath and departs at the moment of last, and between these two points it is given the extraordinary and terrible privilege of living. And when the body fails — as all bodies must — something vast and patient measures what was learned. If the lesson is incomplete, the soul returns. It is given a new body, a new century, new circumstances. The process does not punish. It does not reward. It teaches. And the teaching is accomplished through the only method the soul has ever proven capable of learning from — the method of living.

A Soul's Journey is the account of one such soul.

It begins beneath a Roman amphitheater in 71 BCE, where a young gladiator named Taran kneels in a tunnel and listens to fifty thousand voices roar above him like the sea. He possesses a gift he did not ask for — an opening in the center of his chest through which the suffering of others pours like water through a crack in stone. It will follow him across ten lifetimes. It will be his wound and his instrument. It will break him and remake him and break him again, and he will carry it through two thousand years of history before he understands what it is for.

From the arena, the soul passes into a prisoner entombed for fourteen years in a fortress outside Marseilles, who emerges into revolution and blood. Into an enslaved girl torn from the shores of West Africa, who crosses the Atlantic in chains and carries in her chest a song that does not belong to her. Into a woman of extraordinary ambition in Gilded Age Texas, who builds a fortune in railroads and discovers that wealth is merely the most elegant prison yet constructed. Into a young soldier writing letters home from the trenches of Belleau Wood. Into a bookseller in occupied Lyon, who watches a woman he loves stand at the third shelf every Tuesday and loses her to the deportation trains. Into a preacher of devastating charisma, who raises a temple in the jungles of Guyana and leads nine hundred souls to destruction. Into a disfigured veteran of Afghanistan, sitting on the banks of the Yazoo River in Mississippi with ten years of rage sealed inside him like concrete, who learns on a single September afternoon that grief is not the enemy of healing but its instrument. Into a country doctor on the bayou roads between Thibodaux and Houma, Louisiana, who feels the illness of every patient through the crack in her chest and gives everything she possesses to the parish and reserves nothing — nothing — for herself. And at last, into a child born aboard a vessel called the Adaeze, sailing between the stars, who reaches for a light that has waited ten lifetimes to be seen.

Each chapter bears the voice of a different literary tradition. Each life is connected to the next by the choices made and the lessons refused. Each incarnation carries the same opening in the chest — sometimes a wound, sometimes a gift, in most lives both at once.

This is a novel about the education of a soul. It asks the question that mankind has posed since the first grave was dug and the first prayer was uttered: Why must we suffer? And it offers an answer that belongs to no single faith and no single philosophy but to the long, patient, unfinished business of being human — that suffering is not the lesson. Suffering is the classroom. The lesson is what you do with the opening the suffering creates.

Ten lives. Ten deaths. Ten chances to learn the simplest and most difficult thing a soul can learn — to stay open in a world that never stops breaking you for being so.