Harvest of Gold by Tessa Afshar

Harvest of Rubies was the first book I had read by Tessa Afshar.

Harvest of Gold picks up with some of the same characters. No longer a scribe, Sarah is married and a friend of the Queen. Sarah and her husband Darius, are trying to understand their relationship. Sarah would like a baby, (that is good because she is with child and didn't know yet!) but now they need to travel. She is afraid to tell her husband yet, her relationship with Darius feels very touch and go - married or not! After all, arranged marriages don't always have true love, and just because you are married doesn't mean you have a marriage. Darius is proud, and often stand-offish towards his wife, and yet he is drawn to her on every level. Will being with Nehemiah change his heart and his mind, or is Sarah in for a long unhappy relationship?
Love does NOT make a man weak. It makes him stronger than most men, but only if he can figure it out in time before he looses his wife's heart.

Relationships are being built while Nehemiah works on building Jerusalem's walls. (For those who didn't read the last book, our fictional but very wonderful Sarah is a cousin to the prophet Nehemiah.)
This story is in both Persia and Jerusalem, and we get lots of daily life and activities brought to life for us to enjoy. Restoration, Grace, forgiveness, patience, all are inter-wound. Like the other book there is a lot going in, including some plans for a certain person's assassination! The outcome is going to depend on hearts turned toward, and tuned into God.

Carol :)

This week, the

Christian Fiction Blog Alliance is introducing

Harvest of Gold

River North; New Edition edition (July 1, 2013)

by

Tessa Afshar

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


TESSA AFSHAR was voted "New Author of the Year" by the Family Fiction sponsored Reader's Choice Award 2011 for her novel Pearl in the Sand. She was born in Iran, and lived there for the first fourteen years of her life.  She moved to England where she survived boarding school for girls and fell in love with Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, before moving to the United States permanently.  Her conversion to Christianity in her twenties changed the course of her life forever. Tessa holds an MDiv from Yale University where she served as co-chair of the Evangelical Fellowship at the Divinity School.  She has spent the last thirteen years in full-time Christian work.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The scribe Sarah married Darius, and at times she feels as if she has married the Persian aristocracy, too. There is another point she did not count on in her marriage-Sarah has grown to love her husband. Sarah has wealth, property, honor, and power, but her husband's love still seems unattainable.

Although his mother was an Israelite, Darius remains skeptical that his Jewish wife is the right choice for him, particularly when she conspires with her cousin Nehemiah to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. Ordered to assist in the effort, the couple begins a journey to the homeland of his mother's people. Will the road filled with danger, conflict, and surprising memories, help Darius to see the hand of God at work in his life-and even in his marriage?

A hidden message, treachery, opposition, and a God-given success, will lead to an unlikely bounty.

Tessa can be reached through the Contact link on her Website 

If you'd like to read the first chapter of Harvest of Gold, go HERE.

The book link is: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0802405592