In the Image

In the Image is an extraordinary first novel illuminated by spiritual exploration one that remembers a language a literature a held hand an entire world lived and breathed in the image of God. Bill Landsmann an elderly Jewish refugee in a New Jersey suburb with a passion for travel is obsessed with building his slide collection of images from the Bible that he finds scattered throughout the world. The novel begins when he crosses paths with his granddaughter's friend Leora and continues by moving forward through her life and backward through his revealing the unexpected links between his family's past and her family's future Not just a first novel but a cultural event a wedding of secular and religious forms of literatureIn the Image neither lives in the past nor seeks to escape it but rather assimilates it in the best sense of the word honoring what is lost and finding among the lost things the treasures that can renew the present. Reading group guide included.