I’m pleased to announce that my eighth literary novel about faith, family, freedom, and Western Civilization has been published by IUniverse this week. Thank you, IUniverse!
In this novel with the same setting as Angel Mountain, only a few years later (2023) books are burned, truth is denied, and tyranny threatens freedom. Yet Dr. Jane Foster-once a respected professor of Ethics, now exiled for refusing to conform—awakens to a hymn coming from Angel Mountain. The melody is familiar, perhaps from a chapel long ago? Is it memory? Madness? Or a call? Jane lives alone in Villa Tilifos, Danville, in a grand house whose empty bookshelves mirror the cultural devastation outside. The Social Justice Agency raids homes without warning. Libraries smolder.
The great works of Western Civilization—Socrates, Shakespeare, Austen, Tolkien—are condemned as dangerous relics of a forbidden past. Jane has hidden what she can, but she sees the bonfires increasing daily. Haunted by the child she lost long ago, Jane clings to the ideals her father taught her: goodness, truth, beauty, and the courage to choose the good even when threatened. She summons her former students to join a secret society modeled after the wartime Guernsey Literary Society. Together, they plot to rescue the surviving books and historical documents before they vanish forever.
In Berkeley, near the university, an aging priest hears a medieval hymn echoing through the fog. His hidden basement of sacred texts and his chapel of sacrament and prayer may preserve memory itself.
A young journalist writes about the Vienna holocaust and a high school teacher refuses to lie about the American founding. They soon join Dr. Foster’s book club and mission. As storms batter California and tyranny threatens, Jane confronts her past, finds faith, and decides whether the music of the mountain is a warning… or an invitation. The Music of the Mountain is a literary, inspirational novel about conscience, courage, and our better angels—an ode to freedom and the written word, and those who keep it alive.
Christine Sunderland
