Watcher

High in the Ethiopian mountains, a community of the faithful has kept itself apart from the world for more than a century, living by the discipline of its founders, marking time by the bell and the Book. Then, during evening prayer, a light appears at the front of the meeting house. It has no source. It does not speak. It pulses, slow and patient, like something breathing, and then it is gone. The next evening it returns.

Hannah, the assembly's schoolteacher, has spent her life laying the English of scripture against the Hebrew beneath it, listening for what the words do not carry. Now she begins to watch the shape with the same patience – night after night, year after year – setting down what she sees and refusing to name it, while around her the community fractures into those who call it a trial sent to deceive them and those who call it a presence come to bless them.

The Watcher is a novel about discernment and not-knowing; about a woman's mind in a world built to contain it; and about what it costs to keep a question open after everyone else has decided on the answer.