The Star Seeker (Paperback)

THE STAR SEEKER

In 6 BCE, three Persian scholars followed a star expecting to find a new king. What they found broke one, destroyed another, and left the third with a purpose, but also with questions he still cannot answer.

Fifty years later, old and in hiding, Eudoxus lives in the mountains of Mauretania. He protects a rebel's family and ponders the meaning of his life.

It arrives as a twelve-year-old girl.

Amara has spent her life drowning in other people's emotions. When she unearths an ancient talisman, she finally gains the boundaries she has always craved. But the talisman's previous bearer was consumed by his hunger for power. And Amara is only beginning to discover what she herself hungers for.

As Roman patrols tighten and her brother walks toward violence, Amara must learn what the old scholar paid fifty years to understand: that some gifts cannot be grasped, only received. And that the hardest borders to defend are the ones inside yourself.

Michael Colvin is a writer, educator, and storyteller whose career has taken him across classrooms, congregations, newsrooms, and university halls. A resident of Forest Grove, Oregon, he brings to his fiction the same curiosity about human nature that has animated decades of work in some of the most people-centered professions there are.

Colvin spent years as a teacher, developing the patient attention to how people learn and grow that would later inform his approach to character. His work as a pastor deepened that attention into something more searching - a sustained engagement with questions of meaning, suffering, spiritual formation, and the complicated grace that moves through ordinary lives. Those questions have never left him, and they are woven throughout The Star Seeker and the novels that follow it.

His career extended into university administration, where he worked at the intersection of institutional life and human development, navigating the competing demands of community, mission, and individual flourishing. He brought the same instinct for story to journalism and public broadcasting, where he learned to find the essential human thread in complex events and render it clearly for audiences who had no reason to care until he gave them one.

The Star Seeker is his debut novel and the first book in The Third Path trilogy. Set in first-century CE North Africa, it follows twin protagonists Amara and Juba - children of an Amazigh resistance leader - as they come of age under Roman occupation, guided by a Persian scholar who has been carrying a secret across continents for forty years. The novel draws on Colvin's lifelong interest in Amazigh history and culture, his theological formation, and his belief that the most important stories are the ones that ask what it costs to remain human under pressure.

He lives with his wife Susan in Forest Grove, Oregon, where he is at work on the second novel in the trilogy.