The 12th Commandment

Name: The 12th Commandment
Brand: Blackstone Audiobooks
Availability: InStock
Author: Daniel Torday
ISBN: 9798212271134

Author: Daniel Torday

Narrator: Keith Szarabajka

Unabridged: 8 hr 44 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing

Published: 01/17/2023

Categories: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Visionary & Metaphysical, Jewish Fiction

Synopsis

Swirling with secrets and their consequences, exploring how revelation and redemption might be accessed through sin, and driven through twists and turns toward a startling conclusion, The 12th Commandment is a brilliant novel by award-winning author Daniel Torday.The Dönme sect―a group of Jewish-Islamic adherents with ancient roots―lives in an isolated community on rural land outside of smalltown Mt. Izmir, Ohio. Self-sustaining, deeply-religious, and heavily-armed, they have followed their self-proclaimed prophet, Natan of Flatbush, from Brooklyn to this new land.But the brutal murder of Natan’s teenage son throws their tight community into turmoil.When Zeke Leger, a thirty-year-old writer at a national magazine, arrives from New York for the funeral of a friend, he becomes intrigued by the case, and begins to report on the murder. His college girlfriend, Johanna Franklin, prosecuted the case, and believes it is closed. Before he knows it, Zeke becomes entangled in the conflict between the Dönme, suspicious local citizens, Johanna, and the law―with dangerous implications for his body and his soul.

About Daniel Torday

Daniel Torday is the author of The 12th Commandment, The Last Flight of Poxl West, Boomer1, and the novella The Sensualist. He is a two-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award for fiction and a recipient of the Sami Rohr Choice Prize. His stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Paris Review, the Kenyon Review, and n+1 and have been honored by the Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays series. Torday is a professor of creative writing at Bryn Mawr College. He lives in Philadelphia.

About Keith Szarabajka

Keith Szarabajka has appeared in many films, including The Dark Knight, Missing, and A Perfect World, and on such television shows as The Equalizer, Angel, Cold Case, Golden Years, and Profit. Szarabajka has also appeared in several episodes of Selected Shorts for National Public Radio. He won the 2001 Audie Award for Unabridged Fiction for his reading of Tom Robbins’s Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates and has won several Earphones Awards.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Melissa

Fanatical religion is of interest to me -- no surprise given my Evangelical upbringing. So this book’s description appealed, offering an opportunity to learn about faith outside my personal, formative (and not entirely positive) experiences. I also attended undergraduate and graduate studies in Ohio......more

Goodreads review by Sharon

CW: drug use, description of injuries, blood, medical content, child death, birth scene So, I'm not calling anyone out by name, but one of the most-responded-to reviews of this book complains about the lack of explanation for Jewish (okay, mostly Yiddish terms) and all I have to say is if I need to k......more

Goodreads review by Daniel

I wrote this novel. I hope you love it, and feel fulfilled and challenged and changed by reading it.......more

Quotes

“What a wild, delightful and utterly insane book! The 12th Commandment is a gripping, profound, and utterly absorbing novel in which an investigation into a murder becomes an investigation into mysticism, community, drugs, and what we find when we push our minds to the very limit.” Phil Klay, author of Redeployment and Missionaries

“The 12th Commandment is a one of-a-kind pleasure. A dark murder mystery full of surprises, but also a romantic comedy, but also a serious novel of ideas. Featuring a likable millennial journalist, a likable millennial prosecutor, and––only in America!—a cannabis-loving, assault rifle-toting, ultra-orthodox messianic Jewish cult on a commune in rural Ohio. And also: splendidly written.” Kurt Andersen, author of Turn of the Century

“Daniel Torday’s third novel is a revelation, a page-turner with bursts of prophecy and poetry. The 12th Commandment feels like a genre unto itself—theological noir, Ohio gothic. Torday is such a sharp observer of the spaces where American communities overlap and where the secular and the sacred collide. It’s thrilling to read one of my favorite writers doing something utterly, dazzlingly new.” Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!