The Shoebox Bible

by Alan Bradley

A beautifully written memoir of a family whose mother stores hope in a shoebox. As a child, during the cold, dark winter days of the Second World War, the author found hidden beneath a floorboard in his mother’s bedroom closet a well-worn cardboard shoebox. At the time he could make little sense of the ragtag things he found inside: cigarette packages, soup-can labels, handbills, calendars, paper bags, pie boxes — any scrap of paper upon which his mother could copy out, in her old-fashioned handwriting, what seemed to be no more than unrelated snippets of Scripture. He knew only that the box, which he would later come to think of as the Shoebox Bible, had something to do with the fact that his father had run away from home. Many years would pass, and his mother would be on her deathbed before he would once again hold this treasure in his hands. And only then would he put together the pieces of the puzzle, and learn the complete truth. –Publisher