Krokos

Krokos is a work of Orthodox Christian historical fiction set in seventh-century Arabia - a sweeping, literary novel of repentance, faith, and the unlikely companionship of two people cast adrift in one of history's most consequential landscapes.

In the year 655 A.D., three men are martyred at the hands of Saracen slavers on a remote island at the edge of the known world. A captive Byzantine soldier - a man seeking penance for a murder - bears witness, buries the dead, and takes a relic from each. When the ship carrying him and his fellow captives is destroyed in a storm, he washes ashore on the Arabian coast alongside a pregnant Jewish widow who has lost everything. Together, with nothing but the relics and each other, they begin the long journey north through the deserts and dangers of seventh-century Arabia.

Rich in historical detail and steeped in the language of Orthodox Christian prayer and liturgical tradition, Krokos follows its two protagonists across a religious landscape of remarkable complexity - Orthodox Christianity coming under pressure from the nascent Islamic caliphate, in contact with non-Chalcedonian churches, Rabbinic Judaism, and the remnants of pre-Islamic Arab paganism. The novel engages each of these traditions with seriousness and care, bringing to life a world in which the great faiths of the Middle East were meeting, clashing, and reshaping one another for the first time.

In the tradition of literary historical fiction, Krokos will appeal to readers of novels such as Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, Shūsaku Endō's Silence, Eugene Vodolazkin's Laurus, and the works of Sigrid Undset - books that take seriously the inner life of faith and render the past with both scholarly care and deep human sympathy. It is a novel for readers drawn to serious Christian literary fiction, Eastern Orthodox spirituality, Byzantine history, early Islamic history, and the religious history of the ancient Middle East.

At its heart, Krokos is a novel about repentance and self-giving love - about what it costs to be forgiven and what it looks like to watch grace work slowly and quietly on another person. It operates in the register of traditional Orthodox hagiography while telling a fully human story, and brings to life a period and a place rarely explored in English-language fiction.

Krokos is the debut novel of Basil H. Wild, an Orthodox Christian writer formed in an Arabic-speaking Antiochian Orthodox parish and currently studying for the priesthood in Belgrade, Serbia. His formation within the living tradition of Arab Christianity gives the novel its particular authority and intimacy with its subject matter.