Hady Qassim

In a snowbound village on the French-German border, sometime in the depths of the medieval winter, preacher Elias Rohr has spent twenty years living down a promise he made his congregation and could not keep.

Then a crow comes to his window at night, and speaks to him the way God once spoke to prophets — with a single, unbearable demand: prove, once and for all, that his faith was ever real.

The Terrible Prophet is a Gothic tale of vocation, guilt, and the unbearable closeness of certainty to madness, drawing on the true and disputed history of the 17th-century mystic Jean-Joseph Surin — a man his own contemporaries could never agree was touched by God or simply broken by him.

Set in the early 1900s, Godless follows Don Tommaso Giuseppe, a brilliant and highly articulate Italian priest slowly crushed by a devastating internal crisis of faith. As his mind fractures under the weight of his village's suffering and the absolute silence of heaven, he is consumed by a terrifying question: if God made humanity in His image, does God mourn exactly like us — and does that infinite grief make Him human?

Trapped in a desperate psychological breakdown, Tommaso's gift of language fails him entirely, forcing his agony outward into a secret obsession as he searches for a way to make the silence speak.

Above the heavy, iron beat of a printing press, Theodore Hal is dying. In his hands rests a premature proof of his own obituary — a tidy, sanitized reduction of his life. For five years, Theodore has hidden behind a poem, building a literary monument to his drowned lover, Maureen, trading her starvation for a romantic edge.

With the night slipping away and a silent owl circling in the dark outside his window, Theodore has only until the morning boat sails to write the one true thing he has spent his life avoiding.