Lift the veil of legend for the untold story of Makeda, the Queen of Sheba, and Bathsheba, wife and mother of Israel's first kings. When Makeda, the slave-born daughter of the chieftain of Saba, comes of age, she wins her freedom and inherits her father's titles along with a crumbling earthwork dam that threatens her people's survival. When she learns of a great stone temple being built in a land far to the north, Makeda leads a caravan to the capital of Yisrael to learn how to build a permanent dam and secure her people's prosperity.On her arrival, Makeda discovers that her half-sister Bilkis (also known as Bathsheba) who was thought to have died in a long-ago flash flood, not only survived, but has become Queen of Yisrael. Not content with her own wealth, Bilkis intends to claim the riches of Saba for herself by forcing Makeda to marry her son. But Bilkis's designs are threatened by the growing attraction between Makeda and Yetzer abi-Huram, master builder of...

"He has cast me into the mire, and I have become like dust and ashes." –Job 30:19. Jim Robbins is a dead man, and he knows it. He's fought Yankee and Pawnee, fought for the love of two very different women, fought for his very survival. Now, as the scenes of his life flash before him, his greatest struggle is about to begin. Wounded in a railroad explosion, Jim reviews those moments that shaped him. From the inequities of the Antebellum South, to the horrors of the American Civil War, to the juggernaut of westward expansion, he played his part in the events that forged a nation. In his debut novel, Marc Graham explores what it is that defines a life. Is there meaning and purpose, or is it all just a series of accidents? Is a man simply the victim of circumstance, or maker of his own destiny? Perhaps most important, do his choices and actions survive him, or is his life but a stirring of ashes and dust?