Introducing The Book of Noah

What in the world is The Book of Noah?

Well, if you believe wikipedia, it's a "non-extant Old Testament pseudepigraphal work, attributed to Noah. It is quoted in several places in another pseudepigraphal work, 1 Enoch, as well as mentioned in another, Jubilees. There have also been fragments...in the Dead Sea Scrolls."

Thanks, Wikipedia. 

The Book of Noah I want to introduce you to is not a pseudo-anything. It is a post-apocalyptic, dystopian novel, which is now widely available in ebook form. It takes place both in the near future and five hundred years from now, telling the parallel stories of U.S. Attorney General Chris Cordwainer during World War III, and Noah, the young High Priest-in-training of the Church of Noah, when the “war to end all wars” and its aftermath have radically transformed the country. 

It started out as a story. For most of our preteen to teenage years, my sister Hilary and I used to tell stories every single night for hours at a time. We took our favorite public personas and invented new lives for them, added in characters, built entire worlds of our own making. There were many fabulous stories along the way, but this particular one was told across the end of 2006 and through the first half of 2007. 

Sometime in fall 2008, I was spending a weekend in Bronxville, NY, with Hilary -- she was a senior at Sarah Lawrence College and I was a freshman at Columbia University. I happened to think back on that story and realized that, seen from a certain light, it could be a post-modern Christ story. 

Right about that time, the main character of the future storyline, Noah, marched into my head and introduced himself. 

So I started sketching out his story, and when Hilary asked what I was working on, I told her, and the rest of the weekend went to pot as we hammered out storylines, character sketches, and major plot points. I went away and wrote a 50-60 page detailed outline, which Hilary did her magic on and turned into a proper draft. We sent it back and forth furiously, editing and cross-commenting and trying to find the neutral ground between our significantly different philosophical viewpoints, something that very much came into play in the story. 

When we finally thought we had something, some two years later (spring 2011), we gave it to our dad to read, with great pride. He came back with some kind but very thorough critique. Disappointed, we shelved the project for a few months. But we were unwilling to let it go; it meant too much to both of us, in many ways a personal manifesto for dealing with a crazy, uncertain world. So that fall, we came back to it and dealt with the critiques, reshaping and restructuring the story. It went through several more rounds of edits, until it approached the version you can buy today on Smashwords.com. 

We did think about approaching publishers, but after the nightmarish scenarios Hilary went through trying to get her (amazingly fantastic) historical fiction novels published -- seven months to just hear if the publisher would read it, backlog, editors loving it but never following up, etc - we decided to just go ahead and release it ourselves through the Smashwords platform.

Today's date - Election Day, November 4, 2014, was chosen very deliberately. I think you'll understand when you read it.

So without further ado, let me present The Book of Noah, by Hilary and Gillian Rhodes.

Now available for purchase at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/487258 .

Buy, read, share, love, and be inspired!!!!