The Messiah’s Table

Seven names. One table. One empty chair. There is no door. There is only a table with eight sides, where no place stands above another. Around it sit Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, the Buddha, Confucius, and Krishna. The seventh chair holds Adolf Hitler. The eighth holds no one. No one knows who brought them here or why. They do know that every word spoken at this table will be weighed. Every silence will be read as a confession, and every gesture can become an accusation. What begins as a standoff becomes a reckoning. Those whose words have shaped billions of lives must face the same question as the man whose words led to genocide: what do you owe the people who were commanded in your name? No one is granted absolution. No one gets the last word. And the empty chair waits for the one thing none of them can claim. The Messiah's Table is a bold, unsettling novel about authority, faith, and the terrible power of certainty. Edwin Carrow writes fiction about belief, power, and the stories humanity tells itself to justify both. His work is drawn to the places where conviction becomes dangerous and silence becomes complicity. He lives on the Atlantic coast, far from the institutions he writes about. The Messiah's Table is his first novel.