The Fifth Sacred Thing: A Visionary Novel - Tapa blanda

‘Slated to be one of the great visionary utopian novels of the century.’
Marion Zimmer Bradley

‘This is wisdom wrapped in drama.’
Tom Hayden, California state senator

It is San Francisco, 2048. Priestess Maya Greenwood lives in a tight-knit community run on ecological principles, without poverty, hunger, or hatred, where a rich culture honours its diverse mix of races, religions and sexual orientations, and the Four Sacred Things that sustain life – earth, air, fire and water – are valued above all. The Fifth is Spirit.

In this, Starhawk’s first novel, Maya Greenwood suddenly finds her idyllic world threatened by invasion from the militaristic state to the north: a nightmare place where a totalitarian regime polices a corrupt apartheid state. How can her community, which doesn’t believe in violence, defend themselves?

California is poised to become a battleground between two clashing cultures, and the outcome rests on the wisdom and courage of the community, and particularly in the strength and vision of the extraordinary Priestess Maya. In the tradition of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Starhawk’s visionary novel creates a complex fictional reality about love and war, freedom and slavery, and the future of the living planet.