Desta 1

A moving and riveting epic novel–a family saga, spanning three generations and dealing with their dark and mysterious past, set in a magical mountainous countryside, in a world of monkeys, goats and spirits.

Desta, a seven-year-old boy and Abraham, his middle-aged father, are on separate but parallel missions. The boy dreams of climbing one of the mountains that circle his home to touch the sky and run his fingers through the clouds. Abraham yearns to find his own long lost father. Each faces a series of obstacles and each ultimately realizes his dream, although not in the way he hoped.

In the center of this sweeping novel is a 2800-year old Solomonic gold coin, a family heirloom that went missing along with Desta’s vanished grandfather forty years earlier. A symbol of the family’s financial success and personal pride, this coin is one of the reasons why Abraham grew up fatherless and why his mother abandoned her farmland estate and came to settle in an isolated, mountainous valley, setting the family saga in motion.