THE MATRIARCH MISSION: A Mythic Historical Novel of Love, Sacrifice, and the Divine Feminine

Maxime Trencavel | Tail of the Bird Books | Publishing July 17, 2026

Crimea, 1913. In a hidden cavern lit by an impossible blue glow, thirteen-year-old Oksana Mangupli follows her grandmother past walls of ancient bone and carved bullheads — and meets something that should not exist. What the women of her Krymchak bloodline carry is older than scripture, older than the Black Sea itself: the memory of a goddess the world was made to forget, and a charge that will shape the rest of her life.

Over the next three decades, Oksana lives through the collapse of one world and the birth of another — the last days of the Romanov court, the terror of the Cheka, famine, exile, and at last the machinery of genocide closing over her people. History remembers these years as a chronicle of empires and armies. Oksana knows the truer story moving beneath them: a war over the Divine Feminine that has been fought, and buried, since the dawn of humankind. Asherah was not lost by accident. She was erased. And the same will that erases a goddess will, within Oksana's own lifetime, set out to erase an entire people.

Before any of that, there is a girl who will not be married off quietly:

"The book is The Kingdom of Agarttha: A Journey Into the Hollow Earth," I said, watching Sima's face darken as he thumbed through the French text. "I could only hope my future husband would take me there on our honeymoon."

His fist slammed onto my father's desk. "I cannot have you read such books in my home."

Standing up, I walk to the bookshelf and pull out several books to unhide our family's copy of the Babylonian Talmud. His eyes light on fire, only to be greeted by a widening of my smile. As he heads in a huff toward the door, he turns: "May no good man be so foolish as to entertain your company."

All I can say is "cochon" as he storms out. I am sure he does not know what I said. For it is an animal that we would not eat. And one I would not marry."

Told entirely in Oksana's singular, wry, unforgettable voice, The Matriarch Mission is the sweeping story of one woman's life across the most violent decades of the twentieth century — and the origin point of the Mystery of the Matriarchs series, where its mythology, its four cursed bloodlines, and its central question are born: What is love, when love asks for everything?

This is secret history, not alternate history. Every documented event stands exactly as it happened. Underneath it moves a story the historical record was never able to hold.

For readers of Kate Mosse's Labyrinth, Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, and Geraldine Brooks's People of the Book — intelligent, time-spanning historical fiction in which the past keeps a buried secret, and one woman is chosen to carry it.

What history buries, blood remembers.