Girl Mary — Petru Popescu

With his empire in crisis, Augustus orders a young Roman spy to fi nd a sign of his divinely inspired power. Concealing his real name, Pontius Pilate enters the Judean desert seeking an unknown miracle. The moment he meets the striking adolescent Mary, he senses that he is in the presence of someone magical.

Mary, vigorous, spiritual, and charming, is a girl like many other teenage girls: full of passions and weaknesses, surrounded by her loving family and her close friends, steeped in the mystic traditions of the Jews -- territory that defi es Roman comprehension. The young Pilate isn't wrong in believing that Mary is remarkable. On the verge of blossoming womanhood, Mary's world will soon open to love -- and to the miraculous.

Full of mystical realism and set against the lushly reimagined settings of the biblical world, Girl Mary is the love story of the beautiful girl, naive and yet complicated, who beguiled everyone -- even God -- with her soulful simplicity, and whose destiny would change civilization in untold ways.