MARTHA: "Jesus loves Mary. He too is a spirit of cobweb and starlight, and I think his soul finds some answering echo in her that he finds nowhere else. They rarely speak, but they sit together long after everyone else is in bed, and their silence breathes some strange presence through the house, so that when I get up in the morning, I can still feel it lingering.​

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But Jesus loves me too, He's also a creature of the earth, a hungry, gregarious man who eats and drinks and laughs and sometimes talks too much, and says the wrong thing in the wrong place so that everyone takes offence. If Mary is his companion in silence and the solitude of night, then I am his companion in the laughter and the conversations of daily life, and for the first time ever I realize that my role is as important as hers."

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This intriguing book offers a fictional account of the Last Supper as narrated by sisters Martha and Mary. Lyrical, dramatic, strongly rooted in time and place, it imagines what it was like to be among the anarchic group of followers gathered around Jesus on the night before his death. Outside, Jerusalem broods in darkness, but what passions, hopes and fears swirl among the friends gathered in an upper room, as tensions rise and a terrible sense of foreboding creeps through them?