A Land Without Sin: A Novel - Hardcover

Paula Huston is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Daughters of Song, plus six works of creative nonfiction. Her essays and short fiction have been honored by Best American Short Stories, The Best Spiritual Writing, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She currently teaches in Seattle Pacific University's MFA in Creative Writing program.

One of Publishers Weekly's Best Summer Books 2013
"In A Land Without Sin Paula Huston has written a novel that's wise and wry, tragic and tender, and altogether thrilling. Both moved and enthralled, I couldn't stop reading."
--Robert Clark
Author of In the Deep Midwinter and Love Among the Ruins

"Huston treads where few writers dare, jumping fearlessly into the roiling cauldron of factious Central American politics, class, culture, and religions. No doubt it would have been easier to write a mere gloss, a panoramic report describing the horror of war, revolution, grinding poverty, and the inevitable human carnage. However, the lens through which Huston sees penetrates far deeper than a perusal of these surface wounds to examine the limits of family loyalty, faith, and the causes and cure of hatred. A Land Without Sin is a compelling narrative that leaves me both haunted and hungry for more."
--Gina Ochsner
Author of People I Wanted to Be and The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight

"With some of the sheer excitement of H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines and the depth of soulful inquiry of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, Paula Huston's A Land Without Sin is a savvy look at the violent struggles in southern Mexico over the last quarter century and a vivid perspective on the hopes and perils of liberation theology. It is a poignant and splendid book."
--Ron Hansen
--Author of Mariette in Ecstasy and Atticus --Slant

Narrator Eva tells her story with bold determination and a brashly cynical voice that juxtaposes luminously the compassionate message of the novel.

Paula Huston s lush language, flowing dialogue, and the protagonist s fresh narrative voice all weave together to form this Conradesque story of our faith in each other. While at first a dark and dangerous story of a hardened traveler, A Land Without Sin is ultimately a novel about the beauty of the human soul essentially a counterargument to Conrad s Heart of Darkness. Under the guise of a job as an assistant to an anthropologist studying the Maya, photojournalist Eva Kovic enters Guatemala in search of her brother, Stefan, who has disappeared from a church, having become a priest following a family tragedy twenty years previous. In 1993, the country is on the brink of a revolution, and Eva can trust no one with the details of her secret mission, especially her boss, Jan, who has an ulterior motive of his own: to remove his family from the danger of the impending civil war.
Eva narrates her story with bold determination and an outlook so brash and cynical you could chill a six-pack if you put it next to [her] heart. Eva s skepticism perfectly juxtaposes Stefan s unwavering faith. That they understand each other s beliefs and are united by their childhood experiences makes them a strikingly human pair. Driven by the need to save the other and to solve the mystery of their grandfather s death two decades earlier, the siblings journey reveals that things are never what you d planned on. Instead, they startle you into tears or knock you sideways with how beautiful they are, showing you you've never got it straight, no matter how many facts you string together. The mystery of their history and Stefan s disappearance drives the plot forward, but it is ultimately the relationships that form through Eva s journey that makes for the meat of the story: Jan s dying wife helps Eva to comprehend her brother s motives; Jan provides Eva with a silent understanding of familial love; and a guide named Jet restores her faith in the human capacity for compassion. Each character is unique and whole, and each contributes to the world of the book.

And this world that of the Lacandon jungles of Central America and the Mayan pyramids Jan and Eva attempt to decipher is both gorgeous and terrible, illustrated beautifully by Huston s elegant prose. --ForeWord Magazine

In the jungles of southern Mexico, a revolution is brewing. As tensions escalate between wealthy landowners and poverty-stricken peasants, local priest Stefan Kovic disappears. The church s failure to locate Stefan prompts his sister, Eva, a seasoned photojournalist, to take up the cause. To safely travel in the area, Eva takes a job with Jan, a local Mayan expert doing research nearby and, it turns out, on a secret quest of his own. Guided by a series of letters Stefan left behind, Eva travels deeper into the jungle, her growing uncertainty overshadowed by her fear for Stefan s safety and driven by her need to understand the revelations contained within the mysterious letters. In a journey reminiscent of Conrad s Heart of Darkness, Huston s characters travel a variety of difficult roads, away from all that is known and toward something that brings each far more than any of them bargained for. The novel, which takes readers deep into a land close at hand but worlds away, is a thought-provoking yet familiar journey honoring family, friendship, and the many unexpected paths of self-discovery. --Booklist