The Gospel of Salome

by Kaethe Schwehn

Release Date: October 15, 2025

ISBN (print): 978-1-961741-22-5

ISBN (e-book): 978-1-961741-24-9

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In 38 CE Alexandria, Salome, a skilled physician with a past she’s fought to suppress, struggles to navigate the complex landscape of first-century womanhood and the rapid progression of dementia threatening both her memory and medical practice. 

John Mark, a follower of the fledgling Christian movement, is sent to preach the hope of Yeshua’s message in Alexandria’s synagogues. What he finds, however, is an oppressed and desperate people perhaps more in need of immediate help than eternal salvation: the Roman prefect Flaccus has labeled the Jewish population as alien, quarantining them away from the city’s daily life and consigning them to crushing poverty.

As popular disdain for the Jewish people reaches a dangerous boiling point, John Mark turns to Salome for answers. Her story, which moves from the Greek countryside to the Roman Forum to the dusty hills of Nazareth, begins with a simple statement about Yeshua that threatens to change the characters and their world: “He was my son.”

Kaethe Schwehn

Kaethe Schwehn was born in Chicago but she’s lived beside a lake in Minneapolis, on a sleepy street in Indiana, in a rural mountain village in Washington, across from a Mattress Mart in California, upon the side of a volcano in Ecuador, near the coupling of train cars in Montana, and between the dusty walls of a farmhouse in Iowa. Now she lives in Northfield, Minnesota where the re-enactment of a bank raid each year is softened with the scent of chocolate breakfast cereal cooking in the Malt O Meal factory down the road. 

Schwehn is the author of The Rending and the Nest, Tailings: A Memoir, and Tanka & Me and the co-editor of Claiming Our Callings: Toward a New Understanding of Vocation in the Liberal Arts. Her poems and prose can be found in journals such as Crazyhorse, Pleiades, jubilat, Witness, Minnesota Review and the anthology Fiction on a Stick. She’s been the recipient of a Minnesota Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, a Loft Mentor Series Award, and the Donald Justice Poetry Prize.

Schwehn studied creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Montana and earned a BA from Gustavus Adolphus College.  She currently teaches composition and creative writing at St. Olaf College.

Praise for The Gospel of Salome

“I loved the dark beauty of Kaethe Schwehn’s The Gospel of Salome. It has all the scope and depth of vast history, and all the intimacy and emotion of detailed imagination. Schwehn’s language brings an incredible range of characters and places to life, pairing poetic force and narrative suspense for a story that will have you torn between flying through the pages and lingering over every word. An astonishing achievement.”

— V.V. Ganeshananthan, author of Brotherless Night (winner of the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction and the 2024 Carol Shields Prize)

“With The Gospel of Salome, Kaethe Schwehn utterly transported me to a different time and place. The hypnotic quality of her writing and the compelling story of Salome created the perfect storm in this propulsive narrative that speaks to both modern and ancient sensibilities. Salome touched my soul as a character. I can’t wait to see what Schwehn writes next.”

— Renèe Ahdieh, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Wrath & The Dawn

“In Kaethe Schwehn’s numinous historical novel, an aging physician is asked about her connection to Jesus of Nazareth… The narrative moves like a metronome through time. Salome’s memories are a warm window into her formative years learning medicine. Indeed, the prose shimmers thanks to her organic details about the biology of the human body. Mari, Josef, and Salome have disagreements over Jesus’s future; these are used to reframe the gospel story and its characters in refreshing and profound ways, putting messy flesh on names from antiquity. Moments of agonizing emotion and callous evil arise throughout, reflecting the complex human dramas of first-century society.

The Gospel of Salome is an enthralling biblical novel in which a woman reckons with her past, helping a man choose what story he should tell the world.”

— Foreword Reviews

“Sometimes you begin reading a novel and start to recognize it as the exact book you always wished someone would write. THE GOSPEL OF SALOME instantly rang all those bells for me, giving us full, complicated, flawed people who also happen to be central characters of the gospels. In just-barely-CE Alexandria, Salome — a fierce survivor and healer — begins to tell the story of how she gave up her infant son, a boy named Yeshua, to a couple from Nazareth. From there the mess of humanity rolls on. Brilliantly written on all levels (psychological, dramatic, lyrical), this is a phenomenal novel.”

— Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers and I Have Some Questions For You

“‘The Gospel of Salome’ is a bold and beautiful reimagining… In this richly rendered tale, Kaethe Schwehn breathes life into Salome, a complex figure with her own compelling voice and vision.”

— Rebecca Kanner, author of Sinners and the Sea and The Last One Seen: A Thriller

“An extraordinary novel shaped by the kind of rare imagination that brooks no limits. Inside the outlines of a story familiar to many of us, Schwehn has conjured an utterly original and vivid tale of agency, of callings, of self-definition, of suffering and love and devotion— so that reading this novel feels like digging up a well-trod path to discover, beneath, a whole subterranean ocean. This is a gorgeous, daring book, and I loved it.”

— Clare Beams, author of The Garden and The Illness Lesson