The Dovekeepers

Name: The Dovekeepers
ISBN: 9781451617481

A Novel

Alice Hoffman

A JEWISHBOOKS.COM TOP 18 SELECTION

An ambitious and mesmerizing historical novel from the bestselling author of Rules of Magic. The Dovekeepers is “striking….Hoffman grounds her expansive, intricately woven, and deepest new novel in biblical history, with a devotion and seriousness of purpose” (Entertainment Weekly).

Nearly two thousand years ago, nine hundred Jews held out for months against armies of Romans on Masada, a mountain fortress in the Judean desert. According to the ancient historian Josephus, two women and five children survived. Based on this tragic and iconic event, Hoffman’s novel is a spellbinding tale of four extraordinarily bold, resourceful, and sensuous women, each of whom has come to Masada by a different path. Yael’s mother died in childbirth, and her father, an expert assassin, never forgave her for that death. Revka, a village baker’s wife, watched the murder of her daughter by Roman soldiers; she brings to Masada her young grandsons, rendered mute by what they have witnessed. Aziza is a warrior’s daughter, raised as a boy, a fearless rider and expert marksman who finds passion with a fellow soldier. Shirah, born in Alexandria, is wise in the ways of ancient magic and medicine, a woman with uncanny insight and power.

The lives of these four complex and fiercely independent women intersect in the desperate days of the Roman siege of Masada. All are dovekeepers, and all are also keeping secrets—about who they are, where they come from, who fathered them, and whom they love.

About the Author

Alice Hoffman is the bestselling author of more than thirty works of fiction for adults, young adults, and children, including Practical Magic, The Dovekeepers, and The Marriage of Opposites. Born in New York City in 1952 and raised on Long Island, she is known for blending realism with magic, and in much of her work that sensibility is entwined with Jewish history, memory, and moral questions.

Her most direct engagement with Jewish history comes in a cluster of historical novels. The Dovekeepers (2011) reimagines the siege of Masada in 70 CE through four women who take refuge on the mountain, centering female voices in an episode usually told through male heroism. The Marriage of Opposites (2015) tells the story of Rachel Pissarro, the mother of the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, growing up in the Sephardic Jewish community of St. Thomas. The World That We Knew (2019) follows a young girl in Berlin and the people who protect her during the Holocaust, drawing on Jewish folklore, including the legend of the golem, to explore survival, loss, and resistance. The Museum of Extraordinary Things (2014) brings Jewish immigrant life in early twentieth-century New York to the page, set against the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

Her young adult novel Incantation (2006) portrays a Converso family hiding their faith during the Spanish Inquisition, introducing younger readers to the history of crypto-Jews. Throughout, Hoffman returns to recurring concerns that resonate with Jewish tradition: the endurance of memory, the ethical weight of rescue and witness, the bonds of family and community, the pain of exile and displacement, and the persistence of hope in the face of persecution. Her storytelling often echoes the oral tradition of folktale and midrash, treating the magical and the historical as companions rather than opposites.

Hoffman lives in Boston and Florida. Her novels have been translated into more than twenty languages.