Histria Books is pleased to announce the release of The Flower of Canaan by Tim Flood. This novel is published by Histria Fiction, an imprint of Histria Books dedicated to outstanding original works of fiction.
The Flower of Canaan follows Anat, a young woman in an ancient Levantine city where beauty, marriage and belief can decide a life. As a charismatic outsider unsettles Beit Shahar, Anat and the people closest to her confront a world in which faith is becoming a tool of power, and women are expected to carry the cost.
This is historical fiction with an unusually intimate pulse. It brings the Bronze Age to life not as a museum piece, but as a place of hot streets, family bargaining, private rituals and dangerous public certainty. Anat’s voice gives the novel its force: observant, wounded, funny when it can be, and unwilling to accept the roles assigned to her. The book asks urgent questions about religious extremism, bodily autonomy and who gets to tell a community’s story. Its ancient setting makes those questions sharper, not safer, offering direct access to conflicts that shape lives.
Praise for The Flower of Canaan:
“The Flower of Canaan does what historical fiction about ancient women almost never does: it lets its heroine be furious, strategic, sexual, and sacred all at once, and treats none of those things as contradictions. Flood doesn’t write Anat like a man imagining what a woman feels. He writes her like someone who listened.” — Deviant QuillÂ
Tim Flood writes about characters who challenge their upbringing, seeking deeper relationships and the freedom to fulfill their potential. His forthcoming novel, The Flower of Canaan (2026), explores the roots of societal conditioning and the challenges faced by women in history and myth. He is also the author of the nonfiction book Islands Apart: Chronicles of Family Healing (1999), which examines teen addiction and the impact on families, and his short story “Spaceman” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Retired from a tech career at Stanford University, Flood lives with his wife near San Francisco.
