In Translation

In Translation is the parallel journey of two extraordinary travelers eight hundred years apart. Both are on personal voyages, both are looking for answers, both find inner peace.

A vision comes to seventeen-year-old Rosamund. I dreamed on Shrove Tuesday I would find a most sacred relic." To rescue her village from sin and famine, she is sent by the abbot to Constantinople to translate a relic "of divine power and uttermost brilliance." She disguises herself as a religious pilgrim and embarks on a perilous quest in medieval thirteenth-century Aquitaine.

"It doesn't matter to me how you learn this story, " Jesse writes in his Internet diary. "Only that you do." In Los Angeles at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world is succumbing to ecological and biological disaster. It is the onset of an Ice Age. Nations are gone; city-states endure. Jesse is a cyber-savvy, BASE-jumping ("to put the nerve back in Nirvana") seventeen-year-old on a quest to find his distant, mysterious father.

Rosamund sails on a crusader ship from Venice, is an unwilling witness to the sacking of Zara, becomes a legend--a saint in the making. Je