In this holiest and most fractious city, where religion and politics are inextricably bound, a plot unfolds to bomb the sacred Temple Mount. Christopher Lucas, an expatriate American journalist, skeptical and searching, stumbles upon the Temple Mount plot while on assignment to investigate religious fanatics. Unwittingly entangled in the bombing plan is another American, Sonia Barnes, a Sufi convert and nightclub singer, who is drawn with Lucas into the dangerous intrigues surrounding the Old City. They encounter Adam De Kuff, an unstable Jewish guru; Raziel Melker, a strung-out Kabbalist who foists De Kuff into the role of messiah; and Jan Zimmer, a soldier of fortune routinely at the center of the world's flashpoints. FROM THE CRITICS Entertainment Weekly Pulsing... Daphne Merkin - The New Yorker The definitive novel about Israel....Brims over with plots, subplots, and an impressive array of incisively drawn characters. Philadelphia Inquirer Stunning achievement. Jonathan Rosen - The New York Times Book Review Stone has faced his novel with the literary equivalent of Jerusalem stone, the luminous chiseled rock that lends authenticity to almost every building in Jerusalem. Publishers Weekly From its sublime triumphs to its noble failures, Stone's first novel since Outerbridge Reach (1993) is a major work in every aspect, a sprawling, discordant prose symphony. In Jerusalem, which he depicts as a holy Bedlam, Stone finds the perfect setting for the spiritual agonies that have marked his most powerful writing. In that city, everyone suffers from the burden of faith, or lack of it, and everyone wants something, usually at any price. Expat American journalist Christopher Lucas wants a surer identityborn Christian and Jewish, he feels rooted to neither faithas well as love and, of course, a good story. But his desire has limits, drawn by conscience, and so he serves well as the reader's proxy, a normal man surrounded by seekers of the absolute. Around Lucas swirl addled saints, addicted sinners, con men, cruel members of Hamas and even crueler Israeli security forces. All the parties have their own agendas, most of which hinge on a conspiracy among extremist Israeli Jews and American Christians to blow up the Temple Mount and usher in Armageddon. Stone's presentation of this narrative backbone can be mechanical and sometimes seems extraneous to the novel's main theme of the wages of faith. More captivating is an ancillary plot involving a drug-blasted seeker's attempts to elevate a manic-depressive Jew as a world savior; one of his pawns, Sonia Barnes, an American Sufi who's also Lucas's love interest, proves as compelling as any Stone heroine. Most extraordinary, though, is the author's passionate etching of landscapes both physical and spiritual. The book opens slowly, with a diffuse if portentous ramble through the city, though the narrative intensifies through scenes of terror and moral gravityparticularly in a nightmare Gaza strip inflamed by riotuntil Jerusalem and its people coalesce to iridescent indelibility. Bold and bracing, ambitious and inspired, Damascus Gate is, even for its flaws, an astonishment. (May) (PW best book of 1998) Read all 14 "From The Critics" > WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING Robert Stone is that rare thing, a novelist who goes straight to the heart of the modern inferno. In Damascus Gate he has journeyed to one of the inner circles and come back to bear witness. A frightening, grim, invigorating work. - John Banville An astonishing and thrilling novel. Varieties of Religious Experience for the millennium. By turns scary, funny, and deeply moving.