the Final Shepherd: When World Learns to Listen

Tom Carlisle has spent eight years making his life smaller.After the death of his wife, Anna, the sixty-one-year-old Mackenzie Country farmer has reduced the world to sheep, fences, family visits and the quiet routines of a man who has no interest in religion, prophecy or becoming important.Then a voice says his name.A dying stranger knows who Tom is. A message points him back towards Anna. And before long, Tom is confronted with an impossible claim: Christ is coming.But Tom has not been chosen to predict a date, build a movement or convince the world to believe him.He has been asked to prepare people to recognise Him.As journalists arrive, churches divide, strangers seek answers and unexplained events spread far beyond New Zealand, Tom becomes the reluctant centre of a question that grows larger with every passing day.What if the greatest danger is not disbelief?What if it is certainty?And what if humanity has become so busy deciding who is right that it has forgotten how to truly see one another?Set against the stark beauty of New Zealand's Mackenzie Country, The Final Shepherd is a deeply human novel about grief, faith, doubt, forgiveness, family and the courage to admit: I don't know.