When a violent storm rips the prison barge from its moorings and sets the prisoners adrift, these morally unbound men find themselves in real danger. But a series of remarkable events (dare one call them miracles?) deliver the escaped criminals to shore. Convinced that Ben Alef has saved them, they set out on foot, a small band of unlikely disciples attending their even more unlikely messiah.
Word spreads swiftly--and so does hysteria--as some people claim that Ben Alef is a fraud and some that he's deluded, while a daily growing rabble follows the procession with a deep need to believe, and does so.
In Signs and Wonders, Melvin Jules Bukiet dares to conjure the holiest event of our collective humanity with a viciously acute eye that spares no one. the new messiah must meet the press, the lawyers, the cops, and the swindlers, all of them vying for a piece of the action en route to the only place a modern Second Coming would occur--a theme park ruled by a rodent--as the celestial clock ticks down to '00.
Signs and Wonders is a singularly inventive book, set in full color on the world stage. Rife on the surface with Bukiet's trademark black humor and rage toward a malevolent God, it seethes below with incisive and courageous commentary on history, religious faith, and mankind at the end of this century of the Holocaust.
