Matthew I. Hughes
Matthew I. Hughes writes historical fiction that turns the world's oldest sacred stories into lived, human ones. The work spans two series — The Buried and the Kept, a saga of the Nephites and Lamanites of the Book of Mormon, and The Called and the Kept, novels drawn from the Bible. Different scriptures and different centuries, but one continuous project, bound by a single conviction: that no one should have to live, or die, unseen.
Faithful to the record but always reaching for the people inside it — the keepers and the doubters, the named and the forgotten — these are novels about the ones the histories reduced to a single line, and the lives those single lines leave out. They are books about the God who looks past the face the world reads at a glance, and sees the heart.
This saga began with a short story. As a boy, Matthew I. Hughes read a tale of Teancum in the work of Blaine M. and Brenton G. Yorgason — the brothers whose novels were a fixture among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from the 1970s through the 1990s — and wanted more than the page could hold. The wanting turned to writing, and the writing never quite stopped. What began as a handful of drafts expanding the stories he loved grew, over the years, into books, and the books into a saga — a labor of love decades in the making, offered in gratitude to the storytellers who first showed him that a single line of the record can open into a whole life.
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