The Island of the Innocent

A Novel of Greek and Jew in the Time of the Maccabees

A MIGHTY NOVEL OF PERSECUTION AND MASSACRE AND A LOVE THAT DEFIED DEATH!

THEY MET IN JERUSALEM

A young Greek doctor, devoted to the pleasures of the senses and the intellect, and a passionate, pious daughter of Israel. Hopelessly in love, their beliefs were irreconcilable—until the Syrian-hordes struck at Jerusalem, defiling and slaughtering. Then the woman who loved God and the man who loved liberty united with the embattled Jews under the banner of Judas the Maccabee, to strike back at the enemy who would destroy them both!

“…a richly informed addition to the author’s ‘Testament of Man’ series, sensitively created by the fusion of art and scholarship.”—The New York Times

“Vardis Fisher is one of the most remarkable of American authors. Viewing himself, in effect, as the reincarnation of conflicting personalities of many generations, the recipient of the transmitted subconscious memories of centuries, Fisher went back in his Testament of Man’ to the ape-man progenitor and came up the long, uncertain booby-trapped path. He projected himself into the emerging, rising human being, and went with him through thousands of years of progressions, crises, setbacks, emotions, surges, to get at understanding, if he could, of the basic motivations today in the conduct of the heir of all the human race…the whole sequence is one of the most extraordinary feats in imaginative divination in original Occidental literature.”—Clark Kinnaird, King Features Syndicate

“...well-told historical tale…crisp, vigorous”—San Francisco Chronicle