Despite its Bib­li­cal title — which comes from the open­ing lines of the Book of Exo­dus — award-win­ning nov­el­ist Tom­my Wieringa has craft­ed per­haps his most time­ly book yet, as he traces two sto­ries doomed to collide. 

In one, we fol­low a group of starv­ing, near-fer­al Eurasian refugees on a har­row­ing quest for sur­vival; in the oth­er, we fol­low Pon­tus Beg, a police­man from a small bor­der town on the steppe, as he inves­ti­gates the death of a rab­bi, one of the town’s two remain­ing Jews. 

What fol­lows is a grip­ping saga in which the two sto­ries race toward each oth­er, and Beg will be shak­en to his core by what each one reveals about man’s dark nature, and the pos­si­bil­i­ty — or impos­si­bil­i­ty — of his own redemp­tion. A vir­tu­al para­ble for our times, These Are the Names offers a sus­pense­ful read­ing of a cri­sis that con­tin­ues to dom­i­nate head­lines, and simul­ta­ne­ous­ly explores the endur­ing ques­tions of faith, iden­ti­ty, and what it means to be ​“home.”