Suf­fer­ing guards its mys­ter­ies, but when an upswell of anti­semitism forces Rachel into hid­ing from the Right­eous, she begins her jour­ney to its center.

The trip will take her back in his­to­ry, to Sari­ah, a young woman in Peru try­ing to stay one step ahead of the Inqui­si­tion, and to Jakob, a teenage boy who spends the Holo­caust hid­den in a farm­house where he plans his revenge in the only way he can. Back in the present, Jew­ish chil­dren mur­dered by the Right­eous wait for their sto­ries to be told.

The Bones of the World asks who we become as a result of suf­fer­ing. Like Jakob, desir­ing revenge? Like Sari­ah, seek­ing the salve of a com­mu­ni­ty that accepts her? Or like Rachel, open­ing to the ances­tral suf­fer­ing that is her life’s clay, and her role in the swell of its sto­ry? A deeply spir­i­tu­al book, The Bones of the World seeks to locate the place of suf­fer­ing in a holy world and asks why we must tell these sto­ries that are so often hard to hear.