From Ashes Into Light: A Novel

by Gudrun Mouw

Award-winning From Ashes into Light is a transpersonal tale of epic tragedy, spirituality, family and personal redemption. It is told through three distinct the hauntingly tragic story of Ruth, an Austrian Jewish adolescent during in World War II, Saqapaya, a Native American from coastal California during the time of the Spanish conquest, and Friede Mai.

Friede is born during WW II to a Bavarian soldier and an East-Prussian mother. As those around her struggle with the inevitable chaos and paradox of war, Friede tries to save herself and family members from multiple atrocities. With war behind them, the Mai family immigrates to the US, where Friede, her veteran father and ex-refugee mother struggle with the reverberations of trauma. Friede is unable to find inner freedom until she meets her spiritual guide, a Rabbi, who helps her see that the voices from the past are teachers and the horrors of history are also beacons of light.

Exploring themes of reincarnation, timeless knowing and synchronicity, these three electric points of view weave a narrative of raw consciousness, a moving example of transforming the ripple of suffering into the incredible strength of vulnerability.

From Ashes Into Light won the 2016 International Book Awards for Visionary Fiction, the Living Now Awards Silver Medal for Inspirational Fiction, was a finalist in the 2016 Best Book Awards in New Age and Visionary Fiction, was a finalist for Best First Novel in the 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Awards and won the 5th Annual Beverly Hills Book Awards in New Age and Visionary Fiction.

220 pages, Paperback

Published May 22, 2023

About the author

Gudrun Mouw was born Gudrun Dorothea Wacker in East Prussia in 1944. After her maternal grandfather received deportation papers to Auschwitz, she became a refugee. At the age of 7, she arrived in the United States with her parents as a displaced person.

Gudrun Mouw received her Master’s Degree in English Literature in 1969. In 1978, she received her yoga instructor certificate from the Integral Yoga Institute founded by the late guru Swami Satchidananda.

She has worked as a community college English teacher, a university librarian, a columnist and a California poet-in-the-schools. Ms. Mouw has lived in the Santa Barbara area for 38 years, writing, as well as teaching yoga and meditation.

Her poems have appeared in literary journals such as PRAIRIE SCHOONER, PRACTICAL MYSTIC, THE CHARITON REVIEW, CALYX and others. Ms. Mouw is the recipient of a Sri Chinmoy Poetry Award, a Joycean Arts Guild Award and a Gladys Brown Award for poetry.