Imagine the horror that was Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest and most lethal of the Third Reich's death camps.Imagine it 1944 and a prisoner uprising at this terrible place, the rebels blowing up one crematorium, damaging another, and killing many of their SS masters.Imagine it Jews leading this revolt, a people those same SS thought incapable of fighting.Now imagine one of these leaders a 22-year-old girl, arguably the greatest Jewish heroine to come out of the Holocaust.Finally, imagine her and three other young female inmates arrested by the Gestapo during the investigation that followed the rebellion and savagely tortured for weeks without giving up a single fellow conspirator.Imagine all that and more and you have The Trumpets of Jericho, the only novel ever to tell this extraordinary, true-life story of Jewish resistance to the Nazis. It has everything you could ask of historical fiction: intensive research, action and adventure, heart-wrenching emotion, heroes and villains brought to life with a vividness straight history can't touch. Its main character, Roza Robota, exists to this day as an example of female empowerment at its gutsiest. No one in the book is more courageous than she. Most readers will have never heard of this remarkable girl barely out of her teens, but after Trumpets, none will forget her. The same can be said of the other heroic men and women who inhabit its pages, in which there are as many of the latter as the former. Indeed, without its female conspirators, the revolt of the Sonderkommando (those Jewish wretches forced to work the gas chambers and ovens) couldn't have happened like it did. In that sense, it resembles Kelley's WWII novel Lilac Girls. It also mirrors Uris's sweeping epic of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Mila 18; the horrors Wiesel depicts in his iconic Night; even a feel-good ending to rival that of Schindler's List.Among other awards, Trumpets was named one of Blue Ink Review's Notable Books of the Year.

Fascinated from an early age by the Holocaust, J. Michael Dolan has used his talents as an award-winning novelist and historian to bring the heroic if little-known story he sets forth in Trumpets to life. A traveler in his youth, he has lived in many places, preferring the tropical, but recently moved outside of Austin, Texas to be near his family and because it is a magnet of a city for the freethinking young. Or in his case, he says, the young at heart.Taking a break from the horrors of the Holocaust but not the fertile ground of Jewish history, he is working on a novel set in the Roman-occupied Palestine of the 1st century. Though heavy on iconoclasm (Dolan's literary idol is Gore Vidal), and not lacking in the glorification of the flesh, he claims it at heart a religious book, if not religion as most are taught. The narrator/main character, he adds, might surprise you, too---And no, it isn't who you may be thinking it is.