Nudge by Sandra Moran

A tale of suspense that finds the heroine writing an “Addendum” to the religious texts of the world.

Sarah Sheppard is a highly successful marketing executive at a high profile New York agency.  An unexpected appointment with a strange middle-eastern looking gentleman throws her world into a tailspin when he asks her to leave her job, on the brink of her promotion, to work for his ‘employer’. The task – to edit an ‘Addendum’ to the religious texts of the world. Her atheism and natural cynicism lead Sarah to make light of the offer.  But whoever or whatever wants her to do the job has the power to make it happen.

Reluctantly Sarah finds herself in upstate New York, with a team of academic scholars, working on the outlandish project. As politics and factions are revealed she soon realizes that things are not as they first appear.

Nudge is quite breathtaking. It is quite hard to know what to categorize it as – containing history, religion, social comment, perhaps even a political-religious treatise. More than anything it becomes a novel of suspense as

we follow Sarah’s fluctuating emotions and reactions to the information she is fed and the characters she interacts with.

Sandra Moran’s writing style is, once again, exquisite. The people who populate “Nudge” are deep, layered, multi-faceted, credible and wholly absorbing. Their interactions are both realistic and bizarre – again completely within the context of the story – if they weren’t bizarre it wouldn’t be realistic. These are characters you feel you know.

The storyline itself is incredible – in both senses. The plot is highly unusual and literally ‘beyond-belief’ in its concept of writing and marketing an addendum to the Bible, Quran and Torah, in order to challenge humanities current beliefs. And at the same time we must marvel at the amazing mind that created the idea.

Full of an immense range of facts covering historical figures, faiths and incorporating everything from world events to art history Ms Moran demonstrates a level of scholarly research and intellectual insight that is extremely rare in a novel.

Whatever your creed, and however you react to the challenge that this book might pose to your beliefs, it is an interesting concept that must make us all at least consider the nature of faith and the God we believe in.

At the same time it is an entertaining, educational and wholly spellbinding read.

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