WINNER of the 2024 Illumination Book Award: General Fiction. The explosive novel that confronts the Reformation's horror and heroism. It's 1563 and Europe teeters on a knife-edge. Catholics and Protestants are on the brink of a war so catastrophic that it will kill millions and rage for a hundred years. One voice cries out—pleading for peace and calling for tolerance. Will that voice be heard, or will it be silenced? Based on real-life characters and events, this historical novel tells the story of Sebastian Castellio, a brilliant theologian and ethicist, whose calls for religious tolerance and dialogue in the sixteenth century sparked a violent backlash from his one-time colleague and friend, the renowned Protestant Reformer John Calvin.