Naamah is a parable for our time: a provocative fable of body, spirit, and resilience. In fresh and modern language, Blake revisits the story of the Ark that rescued life on earth, and rediscovers the agonizing burdens endured by the woman at the heart of the story. Here is the woman tormented by dreams and questions of her own-questions of service and self-determination, of history and memory, of the kindness or cruelty of fate. Here is the woman escaping into the unreceded waters, where a seductive angel tempts her to join a strange and haunted world. Blake writes with strong, sensual, modern language, and utilizes time travel and dream sequences to create a multilayered story.

This feminist retelling dives into the matriarch's head and explores the burdens, joys, and sorrows of watching the world end and then begin anew again. In her debut novel, Sarah Blake vividly conveys the story of Noah and the Ark from an unusual perspective that of Noah’s wife, Naamah. Blake's retelling of the biblical story of the great flood focuses not on Noah, but on his wife. Here is the woman torn between faith and fury, lending her strength to her sons and their wives, caring for an unruly menagerie of restless creatures, silently mourning the lover she left behind. JWA sat down with author Sarah Blake to discuss Naamah, one of JWA’s 2019-2020 Book Club picks. Now, in a work of astounding invention, acclaimed writer Sarah Blake reclaims the story of his wife, Naamah, the matriarch who kept them alive. We know the story of Noah, moved by divine vision to launch their escape. A wildly imaginative novel of the reluctant heroine who rescued life on earth.With the coming of the Great Flood-the mother of all disasters-only one family was spared, drifting on an endless sea, waiting for the waters to subside. Early in Sarah Blake’s debut novel, the titular character, wife of Noah, smashes a pair of gerbils with a hard thwack of her spoon. In her 2019 National Jewish Book Award winning novel Naamah, the poet Blake wrote a playful, knowing, serious Jewish novel about a different flood.

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