Children of The Watchers: Before The Flood

Before the waters came, there was a valley.Adah has spent twenty-three years reading the night sky from the roof of her father's house. She knows the courses of the wandering lights, the smell of weather on the wind, the roots that heal and the roots that kill. She has no word for paradise, because she has never lived anywhere else. She has no word for war.Then something comes down from the mountains in the north.They call themselves the Watchers — two hundred of them, beautiful and terrible, who looked upon the daughters of men and chose to descend. They bring gifts the valley never asked for: the working of metal, the reading of the stars, the secrets of root and flame and adornment. And they take wives. Adah takes one of them — Shemhazai, one of the unnamed — and bears him a daughter the world has no category to hold.Her name is Nira. She is not quite human and not quite other. And she is only the first of the children to come.As the years turn, the gifts curdle into appetite. The giants are born. Knowledge sharpens into weaponry, beauty hollows into hunger, and the cry of the earth rises until it reaches the throne of heaven itself. Adah watches all of it — the love that should never have been, the daughter she would burn the world to protect, the slow tilt of an entire age toward its ending — and she understands, long before anyone will say it aloud, what the gathering means.A reckoning is coming. And she intends to be there when it arrives.Drawn faithfully from the Book of 1 Enoch and the Book of Genesis, Children of the Watchers reimagines the most mysterious passage in scripture — the days when the sons of God came down to the daughters of men — as a sweeping, intimate, and devastatingly human story. It is a novel about love across an impossible divide, about a mother and the child the world cannot name, and about a people who chose the extraordinary over the eternal, with their eyes wide open.The first book of the After Eden series. Read more