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The Shattered Mosaic: A father's search for proof in a world of faith
Jacob Hinsen made his nine-year-old daughter a I'll always protect you. We'll always be together.
Three weeks later, she was dead.
He couldn't protect her. But maybe, just maybe, they could still be together. If God exists and has Jessica, Jacob needs to find Him.
Everyone at the hospital said the same "She's with God now." Catholics, Muslims, and Jews all claim the same God exists and embraces the departed. But they offer contradictory paths to reach Him. Jacob needs to Does God exist? And if He does, which path truly leads to Him?
Jacob is a lawyer who built his career on evidence. Now he's investigating the most important case of his life.
His search takes him through the three great Abrahamic faiths. Catholic priests in Rome promise heaven through sacraments. Muslim imams in Istanbul promise paradise through submission. Jewish rabbis in Jerusalem offer conflicting answers about the afterlife and whether God can even be found.
Each tradition claims the same God.
Each promises reunion with the dead.
Each contradicts the others about how to reach Him.
Each admits, when pressed, they have no proof.
While his marriage ends and his career collapses, Jacob discovers that all three religions fracture over interpretation, make claims they cannot verify, and have killed each other for centuries while claiming the same God.
Six months. Three continents. One impossible
Does any path lead to God? Does any path lead to Jessica?
THE SHATTERED MOSAIC
Three religions. The Same God. Divergent paths. A father who must discover if one leads to his daughter.
Three weeks later, she was dead.
He couldn't protect her. But maybe, just maybe, they could still be together. If God exists and has Jessica, Jacob needs to find Him.
Everyone at the hospital said the same "She's with God now." Catholics, Muslims, and Jews all claim the same God exists and embraces the departed. But they offer contradictory paths to reach Him. Jacob needs to Does God exist? And if He does, which path truly leads to Him?
Jacob is a lawyer who built his career on evidence. Now he's investigating the most important case of his life.
His search takes him through the three great Abrahamic faiths. Catholic priests in Rome promise heaven through sacraments. Muslim imams in Istanbul promise paradise through submission. Jewish rabbis in Jerusalem offer conflicting answers about the afterlife and whether God can even be found.
Each tradition claims the same God.
Each promises reunion with the dead.
Each contradicts the others about how to reach Him.
Each admits, when pressed, they have no proof.
While his marriage ends and his career collapses, Jacob discovers that all three religions fracture over interpretation, make claims they cannot verify, and have killed each other for centuries while claiming the same God.
Six months. Three continents. One impossible
Does any path lead to God? Does any path lead to Jessica?
THE SHATTERED MOSAIC
Three religions. The Same God. Divergent paths. A father who must discover if one leads to his daughter.
503 pages, Paperback
Published October 16, 2025
7 people are currently reading
418 people want to read
About the author
A.W. Schade
4 books12 followers Marine and Vietnam Combat Veteran, former Bank Manager, twenty-eight years in corporate management, and author of Jacob’s inspirational journey; “Looking for God within the Kingdom of Religious Confusion.”
In addition, he wrote two personal stories on PTSD, ‘‘The demons of war are persistent" and "Not alone" — Both are FREE stories to help veterans and families recognize and break the stigma of PTSD. Also, “If I fail, what doom awaits the children,” Suspense, and “The Greatest Father” Satire.
All five stories are included in Schade’s new anthology “anthologyPERCEPTION.”
Schade is married, father of three young men, and received his Business Management degree from Syracuse University. Schade’s stories can be found at my website or Amazon, B&N, Audible.com and more.
In addition, he wrote two personal stories on PTSD, ‘‘The demons of war are persistent" and "Not alone" — Both are FREE stories to help veterans and families recognize and break the stigma of PTSD. Also, “If I fail, what doom awaits the children,” Suspense, and “The Greatest Father” Satire.
All five stories are included in Schade’s new anthology “anthologyPERCEPTION.”
Schade is married, father of three young men, and received his Business Management degree from Syracuse University. Schade’s stories can be found at my website or Amazon, B&N, Audible.com and more.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
April 18, 2026
‘The Shattered Mosaic: A Father's Search for Proof in a World of Faith’ by A.W. Schade is one of those rare books you finish with trembling hands, which, as anyone who knows me will attest, is precisely how I always hope to feel after reading something truly worthwhile. What Schade has achieved in this devastating, luminous, philosophically restless novel is nothing short of extraordinary. It is a book that reads at once as a grieving father's cri de coeur, a comparative-theological tour de force, and a quiet mystical prayer, and which refuses to release its grip on you long after the last page has been turned. Very moving. Very powerful.
At its heart, this is the story of Jacob Hinsen who is a lawyer, Vietnam combat veteran, husband, and most devastatingly – a father. The novel begins with Jacob making his nine-year-old daughter Jessica the kind of impossible, beautiful vow every loving parent makes and no parent can actually keep - that he would always shield her, that nothing would ever part them. Three weeks later, Jessica is dead. An accident has stolen her from him, and with her, the entire architecture of his life.
Jacob is a man whose whole career has been built on the patient accumulation of evidence, whose mind is forged for cross-examination, whose faith in the courtroom is absolute – but now he is left standing in a universe that has offered no case, produced no witness, and returned no verdict. The Prophet Job situation – something that what almost every third person on this Earth goes through.
But most painful of all of course, the one thing everyone keeps offering him. At the hospital, at the funeral, from every direction -she is with God now. The Catholic neighbour says it. The Muslim acquaintance says it. The Jewish friend says it. All three traditions claim the same God. All three promise reunion with the beloved dead. All three cannot agree on how, exactly, one actually reaches Him. And it is here, in this paralyzing contradiction, that Jacob Hinsen - father, lawyer to his marrow, and a man whose universe has just disintegrated decides to do something very few grief-struck parents have ever done. Which then makes him not very much like every third person in the world undergoing this pain as I have mentioned earlier.
He decides to investigate.
Thus begins the bravest premise in contemporary literary fiction I have encountered in years - a six-month, three-continent pilgrimage through the three great Abrahamic faiths. Catholic priests in Rome, promising heaven through sacrament and resurrection. Muslim imams in Istanbul, promising paradise through submission and the purifying discipline of prayer. Jewish rabbis in Jerusalem, offering the most humbling answer of all - that even the nature of the afterlife is contested terrain, and that the very question of whether God can be found at all is held, in the Jewish tradition, with astonishing honesty. Each tradition claims the same God. Each promises reunion with the dead. Each, when pressed by the relentless lawyer's questions of a man who has lost his child, admits it has no proof. And while Jacob roams the world, back home his marriage is fracturing, his law practice is teetering on collapse, and the small, steady, beautiful circle of people who love him is left to gather up what remains.
I cannot, in any honesty, praise the architecture of this book highly enough. It moves with the gravity of a processional - grief, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and then a homeward arc that refuses the cheap resolution a lesser novelist would surely have delivered. Schade is too honest a man to manufacture closure. What he gives us instead is something infinitely better. He gives us a portrait of a soul that has travelled the whole known map of God-searching and returned, not empty-handed exactly, but carrying something quieter than certainty and, perhaps, far more precious.
The supporting characters alone would justify this book five times over. Father Doyle, the Catholic priest whose patient friendship with Jacob is drawn with such tenderness that I found myself grateful for every scene in which he appeared. In Istanbul, two encounters crack the novel open. The first is with a nine-year-old girl named Amina, whose small and unforgettable presence offers Jacob a mirror he can barely bear to look into; I have rarely read a character so economically drawn and so devastating in effect.
The second is with the luminous Yasmin al-Khafaji, whose brief shining time with Jacob produces one of the most moving meditations on love, strangers, and the transcendence of death that I have read in contemporary fiction. Arnold Kellner, the philosophy professor who drops into the story like a wandering sage and has a way of asking precisely the right question in precisely the wrong direction. Tom, Jacob's business partner and dearest friend, whose quiet heroism in holding the firm together while Jacob is abroad is its own form of spiritual labor.
Sarah, whose own story of holding onto hope through adversity is one of the book's most illuminating arcs. And above all, there is Margaret. Margaret is Jacob's mother-in-law, Jessica's grandmother, the woman who stays home and keeps everything that has not yet broken from breaking. She is, in every sense I can name, the axis mundi of this novel. She is God in a dressing gown. Do not miss her. Lovely person. I wish my mother in law ‘that could have been’ was like her – but not to be. Mine was a very embittered woman, passed away in her own bitterness. God rest her soul, but we need more mother-in-laws like Margaret please! So please send us more Margarets on Earth, and for the rest – keep them with you God till Judgement Day. They need you more than we need them!
I want to linger for a moment on the great turning scene of the book. I will not say which scene delivers it, because one must come to such moments as the novel itself arranges them. I will only say that a woman religious, speaking to Jacob with a gentleness that utterly undoes him, observes that God is not argued into existence. He is found, she tells Jacob, only when one finally stops demanding proof. That single line is the hinge on which the entire novel swings. And it is, not incidentally, the exact insight at the heart of Benedictine lectio divina, of the Sufi dhikr, of the Hindu path of jnana yoga, and of the via negativa of Pseudo-Dionysius - that you do not find the Divine by mounting a case against it. You find it by falling silent. That a contemporary American novelist could reach this insight and deliver it so cleanly, so without piety or condescension, strikes me as something close to a small miracle in its own right.
A word must be said about Schade's craft. The prose is lean, unshowy, and utterly precise - the voice of a man who spent twenty-eight years in corporate management and still knows how to construct an argument, and who also happens to have served in combat in Vietnam, and who knows exactly what loss does to the texture of a life. He writes grief the way Denise Levertov wrote grief, the way Marilynne Robinson writes it in ‘Gilead’ - with the respect of a craftsman who refuses to cheapen the thing he is shaping. The dialogue, especially in the long theological exchanges, is genuinely superb, and yet Schade never once forgets that this is a novel and not a theology seminar. Other readers have already noted the parallel between Jacob's journey and that of Gilgamesh, roaming the ancient world in search of an answer to death itself, and I think it is a profoundly apt comparison. ‘The Shattered Mosaic’ has the bones of a myth inside it. Profound, Deep and Inspirational.
A word too on the theological reach of this book, which is genuinely impressive. Reading it as a Catholic woman in Benedictine formation who has spent these past years immersed in both the Abrahamic and the Vedantic contemplative traditions as a highly skilled theologian and philosopher, I can say without a doubt that Schade has done his homework. The three great monotheisms do claim the same God. They do promise reunion with the departed. And they do, when finally pressed, admit that they possess no laboratory-grade proof - only scripture, tradition, and the long testimonies of saints and mystics across the centuries.
Schade is not cruel about this. He is not, despite what some readers may assume, a cynic. He is something far finer. He is a man who has clearly sat with this question for a very long time - a writer who has said publicly that this novel is the fruit of 70 years of questioning and 15 years of writing - and every page of the book bears the marks of that patience. It bears the marks of that refusal to flinch. It bears the marks, most of all, of an enormous respect for the reader's own inner life.
I want to say something now to anyone wavering about picking up this book because they fear it will be too heavy, too theological, or too sad. I have read my share of books on grief - Joan Didion, C.S. Lewis's ‘A Grief Observed’, Julian Barnes's ‘Levels of Life’, and the Book of the Prophet Job itself - and this novel belongs unquestionably in that company. Yes, it is sad. It is supposed to be. But it is also, astonishingly, hopeful in the way only truly honest books ever manage to be hopeful, because it earns its hope the hard way, inch by painful inch. If you have ever lost anyone. If you have ever wondered whether your prayers were reaching anything at all. If you have ever been told that your beloved was in a better place and wanted, with every fiber of your being, to believe it and simply could not - this book was written for you. I have lost three loved ones back to back in a matter of less than 4 months time in between the years 2024 and 2025 (November 2024 to February 2025), and I know what grief means – because those three people meant more to me than my life itself and all that I have ever done or that I ever will do. I know what grief means – I know the depth of the line ‘a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief.’ And so I can understand Schade’s pain more than he will ever be able to know or fathom.
A note for my IBDP and AS & A Level students and for my readers from the teaching side of my life – ‘The Shattered Mosaic’ would be an extraordinary companion text for any senior-year Theory of Knowledge (TOK) course, any IBDP comparative religion unit, any AS-level philosophy class on the problem of evil and suffering, or indeed any graduate seminar on the relationship between evidence, testimony, and faith. In its quietly devastating pages, it accomplishes what most doctoral dissertations fail to do in twice the space - it makes the question live. Excellent educative stuff happening here people!
Five stars, unreservedly, and my deep and grateful thanks to A.W. Schade for writing it. I will be reading ‘The Shattered Mosaic’ again, I suspect, every few years for the rest of my life, and it will be a short one, praise the Lord. My life, not the book! I will be recommending it to every grieving parent, every searching soul, and every friend who has ever asked me during our spiritual direction sessions - whether any of it is real.
Highly, highly recommended. A Brave book.
At its heart, this is the story of Jacob Hinsen who is a lawyer, Vietnam combat veteran, husband, and most devastatingly – a father. The novel begins with Jacob making his nine-year-old daughter Jessica the kind of impossible, beautiful vow every loving parent makes and no parent can actually keep - that he would always shield her, that nothing would ever part them. Three weeks later, Jessica is dead. An accident has stolen her from him, and with her, the entire architecture of his life.
Jacob is a man whose whole career has been built on the patient accumulation of evidence, whose mind is forged for cross-examination, whose faith in the courtroom is absolute – but now he is left standing in a universe that has offered no case, produced no witness, and returned no verdict. The Prophet Job situation – something that what almost every third person on this Earth goes through.
But most painful of all of course, the one thing everyone keeps offering him. At the hospital, at the funeral, from every direction -she is with God now. The Catholic neighbour says it. The Muslim acquaintance says it. The Jewish friend says it. All three traditions claim the same God. All three promise reunion with the beloved dead. All three cannot agree on how, exactly, one actually reaches Him. And it is here, in this paralyzing contradiction, that Jacob Hinsen - father, lawyer to his marrow, and a man whose universe has just disintegrated decides to do something very few grief-struck parents have ever done. Which then makes him not very much like every third person in the world undergoing this pain as I have mentioned earlier.
He decides to investigate.
Thus begins the bravest premise in contemporary literary fiction I have encountered in years - a six-month, three-continent pilgrimage through the three great Abrahamic faiths. Catholic priests in Rome, promising heaven through sacrament and resurrection. Muslim imams in Istanbul, promising paradise through submission and the purifying discipline of prayer. Jewish rabbis in Jerusalem, offering the most humbling answer of all - that even the nature of the afterlife is contested terrain, and that the very question of whether God can be found at all is held, in the Jewish tradition, with astonishing honesty. Each tradition claims the same God. Each promises reunion with the dead. Each, when pressed by the relentless lawyer's questions of a man who has lost his child, admits it has no proof. And while Jacob roams the world, back home his marriage is fracturing, his law practice is teetering on collapse, and the small, steady, beautiful circle of people who love him is left to gather up what remains.
I cannot, in any honesty, praise the architecture of this book highly enough. It moves with the gravity of a processional - grief, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and then a homeward arc that refuses the cheap resolution a lesser novelist would surely have delivered. Schade is too honest a man to manufacture closure. What he gives us instead is something infinitely better. He gives us a portrait of a soul that has travelled the whole known map of God-searching and returned, not empty-handed exactly, but carrying something quieter than certainty and, perhaps, far more precious.
The supporting characters alone would justify this book five times over. Father Doyle, the Catholic priest whose patient friendship with Jacob is drawn with such tenderness that I found myself grateful for every scene in which he appeared. In Istanbul, two encounters crack the novel open. The first is with a nine-year-old girl named Amina, whose small and unforgettable presence offers Jacob a mirror he can barely bear to look into; I have rarely read a character so economically drawn and so devastating in effect.
The second is with the luminous Yasmin al-Khafaji, whose brief shining time with Jacob produces one of the most moving meditations on love, strangers, and the transcendence of death that I have read in contemporary fiction. Arnold Kellner, the philosophy professor who drops into the story like a wandering sage and has a way of asking precisely the right question in precisely the wrong direction. Tom, Jacob's business partner and dearest friend, whose quiet heroism in holding the firm together while Jacob is abroad is its own form of spiritual labor.
Sarah, whose own story of holding onto hope through adversity is one of the book's most illuminating arcs. And above all, there is Margaret. Margaret is Jacob's mother-in-law, Jessica's grandmother, the woman who stays home and keeps everything that has not yet broken from breaking. She is, in every sense I can name, the axis mundi of this novel. She is God in a dressing gown. Do not miss her. Lovely person. I wish my mother in law ‘that could have been’ was like her – but not to be. Mine was a very embittered woman, passed away in her own bitterness. God rest her soul, but we need more mother-in-laws like Margaret please! So please send us more Margarets on Earth, and for the rest – keep them with you God till Judgement Day. They need you more than we need them!
I want to linger for a moment on the great turning scene of the book. I will not say which scene delivers it, because one must come to such moments as the novel itself arranges them. I will only say that a woman religious, speaking to Jacob with a gentleness that utterly undoes him, observes that God is not argued into existence. He is found, she tells Jacob, only when one finally stops demanding proof. That single line is the hinge on which the entire novel swings. And it is, not incidentally, the exact insight at the heart of Benedictine lectio divina, of the Sufi dhikr, of the Hindu path of jnana yoga, and of the via negativa of Pseudo-Dionysius - that you do not find the Divine by mounting a case against it. You find it by falling silent. That a contemporary American novelist could reach this insight and deliver it so cleanly, so without piety or condescension, strikes me as something close to a small miracle in its own right.
A word must be said about Schade's craft. The prose is lean, unshowy, and utterly precise - the voice of a man who spent twenty-eight years in corporate management and still knows how to construct an argument, and who also happens to have served in combat in Vietnam, and who knows exactly what loss does to the texture of a life. He writes grief the way Denise Levertov wrote grief, the way Marilynne Robinson writes it in ‘Gilead’ - with the respect of a craftsman who refuses to cheapen the thing he is shaping. The dialogue, especially in the long theological exchanges, is genuinely superb, and yet Schade never once forgets that this is a novel and not a theology seminar. Other readers have already noted the parallel between Jacob's journey and that of Gilgamesh, roaming the ancient world in search of an answer to death itself, and I think it is a profoundly apt comparison. ‘The Shattered Mosaic’ has the bones of a myth inside it. Profound, Deep and Inspirational.
A word too on the theological reach of this book, which is genuinely impressive. Reading it as a Catholic woman in Benedictine formation who has spent these past years immersed in both the Abrahamic and the Vedantic contemplative traditions as a highly skilled theologian and philosopher, I can say without a doubt that Schade has done his homework. The three great monotheisms do claim the same God. They do promise reunion with the departed. And they do, when finally pressed, admit that they possess no laboratory-grade proof - only scripture, tradition, and the long testimonies of saints and mystics across the centuries.
Schade is not cruel about this. He is not, despite what some readers may assume, a cynic. He is something far finer. He is a man who has clearly sat with this question for a very long time - a writer who has said publicly that this novel is the fruit of 70 years of questioning and 15 years of writing - and every page of the book bears the marks of that patience. It bears the marks of that refusal to flinch. It bears the marks, most of all, of an enormous respect for the reader's own inner life.
I want to say something now to anyone wavering about picking up this book because they fear it will be too heavy, too theological, or too sad. I have read my share of books on grief - Joan Didion, C.S. Lewis's ‘A Grief Observed’, Julian Barnes's ‘Levels of Life’, and the Book of the Prophet Job itself - and this novel belongs unquestionably in that company. Yes, it is sad. It is supposed to be. But it is also, astonishingly, hopeful in the way only truly honest books ever manage to be hopeful, because it earns its hope the hard way, inch by painful inch. If you have ever lost anyone. If you have ever wondered whether your prayers were reaching anything at all. If you have ever been told that your beloved was in a better place and wanted, with every fiber of your being, to believe it and simply could not - this book was written for you. I have lost three loved ones back to back in a matter of less than 4 months time in between the years 2024 and 2025 (November 2024 to February 2025), and I know what grief means – because those three people meant more to me than my life itself and all that I have ever done or that I ever will do. I know what grief means – I know the depth of the line ‘a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief.’ And so I can understand Schade’s pain more than he will ever be able to know or fathom.
A note for my IBDP and AS & A Level students and for my readers from the teaching side of my life – ‘The Shattered Mosaic’ would be an extraordinary companion text for any senior-year Theory of Knowledge (TOK) course, any IBDP comparative religion unit, any AS-level philosophy class on the problem of evil and suffering, or indeed any graduate seminar on the relationship between evidence, testimony, and faith. In its quietly devastating pages, it accomplishes what most doctoral dissertations fail to do in twice the space - it makes the question live. Excellent educative stuff happening here people!
Five stars, unreservedly, and my deep and grateful thanks to A.W. Schade for writing it. I will be reading ‘The Shattered Mosaic’ again, I suspect, every few years for the rest of my life, and it will be a short one, praise the Lord. My life, not the book! I will be recommending it to every grieving parent, every searching soul, and every friend who has ever asked me during our spiritual direction sessions - whether any of it is real.
Highly, highly recommended. A Brave book.
February 28, 2026
“Good morning, Sister,” he said. “I’ve been asking questions everywhere I go, and I keep finding more confusion.”
She opened her eyes, calm and luminous. “The answers are not in the questions, my son. They are in silence. God is not argued into existence. He is found when you stop demanding proof.”
—The Shattered Mosaic
For any soul who has lost something precious, those answers rarely feel like enough. At least not for a long, long time. Even to absorb words that are wise and true, the mind must be still… and grief does not offer stillness easily.
True to its title, “The Shattered Mosaic” shatters your thoughts/emotions as it wrestles with faith and the relentless question: ‘Where is God?’ Especially when you truly, desperately need Him. Not for miracles. Not for demands. Only for the smallest mercy: a sign that He exists.
This is a story of Jacob, a father, who searches for God’s presence simply to believe that his nine-year-old daughter, Jessica, is safe after accidental death—somewhere beyond this world, in what we call Heaven. He isn’t trying to bring her back. He isn’t bargaining for the impossible. He just wants assurance that she is okay—held in God’s Kingdom. While everyone processes grief differently (some deeper and longer than others), it’s also true that the living still carry responsibilities that don’t pause for sorrow. Long before Jacob begins looking for answers, Margaret, Jessica’s grandmother, remains the anchor keeping everything from falling apart. In his grief, Jacob steps away from the firm he built, leaving his partner, Tom, to hold everything together alone. Then, slowly, the business begins to fracture under the weight of absence because grief doesn’t only hollow out a heart; it can unravel a life’s work too, and the people left behind.
Across these 303 pages, Jacob leads us through what he discovers, what he can’t, and what faith becomes when it’s scraped down to the bone. For me, this was a story of familiar questions, desperation, and destruction—and the first fragile steps toward self-peace. Anyone who has experienced grief, or stood near it, will recognize themselves here. Maybe even finding their own answers… or at least a measure of peace.
She opened her eyes, calm and luminous. “The answers are not in the questions, my son. They are in silence. God is not argued into existence. He is found when you stop demanding proof.”
—The Shattered Mosaic
For any soul who has lost something precious, those answers rarely feel like enough. At least not for a long, long time. Even to absorb words that are wise and true, the mind must be still… and grief does not offer stillness easily.
True to its title, “The Shattered Mosaic” shatters your thoughts/emotions as it wrestles with faith and the relentless question: ‘Where is God?’ Especially when you truly, desperately need Him. Not for miracles. Not for demands. Only for the smallest mercy: a sign that He exists.
This is a story of Jacob, a father, who searches for God’s presence simply to believe that his nine-year-old daughter, Jessica, is safe after accidental death—somewhere beyond this world, in what we call Heaven. He isn’t trying to bring her back. He isn’t bargaining for the impossible. He just wants assurance that she is okay—held in God’s Kingdom. While everyone processes grief differently (some deeper and longer than others), it’s also true that the living still carry responsibilities that don’t pause for sorrow. Long before Jacob begins looking for answers, Margaret, Jessica’s grandmother, remains the anchor keeping everything from falling apart. In his grief, Jacob steps away from the firm he built, leaving his partner, Tom, to hold everything together alone. Then, slowly, the business begins to fracture under the weight of absence because grief doesn’t only hollow out a heart; it can unravel a life’s work too, and the people left behind.
Across these 303 pages, Jacob leads us through what he discovers, what he can’t, and what faith becomes when it’s scraped down to the bone. For me, this was a story of familiar questions, desperation, and destruction—and the first fragile steps toward self-peace. Anyone who has experienced grief, or stood near it, will recognize themselves here. Maybe even finding their own answers… or at least a measure of peace.
April 12, 2026
This is one of the BEST books I have ever read. It taught me, validated me, and entertained me. Jacob's quest is one I strongly identify with on a personal level. I've spent much of my adult life trying to figure out what I believe, to find my truth.
This book is obviously researched thoroughly and provides not only information and inspiration but a beautiful mental picture of the amazing places and people Jacob visits while searching for answers.
I honestly think EVERYONE should read this book - and share it with others. Whether religious or not, this book will definitely provoke you to deep emotion, self-examination, and assist you in finding your own truth.
This book is obviously researched thoroughly and provides not only information and inspiration but a beautiful mental picture of the amazing places and people Jacob visits while searching for answers.
I honestly think EVERYONE should read this book - and share it with others. Whether religious or not, this book will definitely provoke you to deep emotion, self-examination, and assist you in finding your own truth.
Read
January 11, 2026Woke up to a #1 Bestseller in Literary Fiction & Agnosticism. Free until tomorrow! I applied 28 years of IBM systems logic to the "mosaic" of my life. Within 24 hours Over 1,400+ people downloaded the story joined the journey this weekend.
March 13, 2026
When we look up at the night sky, so many of those stars have long ago perished. Yet, those illuminations still shine to us thousands or even millions of years later... Jacob Hinsen's quest parallels that of Gilgamesh, five thousand years ago in "The Epic of Gilgamesh"... Why? Where do we go after we seemingly expire on Earth?
Anything worth achieving, there must be a cost. In Jacob's case, that comes in the form of losing his best friend Tom, his business (that he built with Tom), and most importantly the knowledge that his actions were causing others' pain.
Therefore, just as Gilgamesh, Jacob's quest into why his daughter must die, and is there definitive proof of the afterlife that he promised to her, ends just as it began: no human has such divine knowledge. Yet, it's the realization that his daughter does remain with him, through his actions, as she still influences those decisions, as a deceased star still shines to us. Was that realization worth the cost to Jacob?... Perhaps, there's a sequel?
Regardless of what one may think of Jacob and Tom (are they both in their own selfish pursuits?), Margaret shines through. Margaret, Jacob's mother-in-law, Jessica's grandmother, obviously in mourning herself, holds this ship together from sinking: Jacob and his quest, Tom's pursuit to save the business, all the while in her own grieving process.
Anything worth achieving, there must be a cost. In Jacob's case, that comes in the form of losing his best friend Tom, his business (that he built with Tom), and most importantly the knowledge that his actions were causing others' pain.
Therefore, just as Gilgamesh, Jacob's quest into why his daughter must die, and is there definitive proof of the afterlife that he promised to her, ends just as it began: no human has such divine knowledge. Yet, it's the realization that his daughter does remain with him, through his actions, as she still influences those decisions, as a deceased star still shines to us. Was that realization worth the cost to Jacob?... Perhaps, there's a sequel?
Regardless of what one may think of Jacob and Tom (are they both in their own selfish pursuits?), Margaret shines through. Margaret, Jacob's mother-in-law, Jessica's grandmother, obviously in mourning herself, holds this ship together from sinking: Jacob and his quest, Tom's pursuit to save the business, all the while in her own grieving process.
October 17, 2025
For anyone who has ever truly loved and lost, this book is for you. When your soul needs answers you can’t rest. What do we really know for absolute certainty about our belief system? What makes us right and everyone else wrong? Gripping and Thought provoking. This author certainly felt every word.
March 15, 2026
Jacob's journey was heart-wrenching and intellectually satisfying.
As one who has struggled with faith-and developed a healthy disrespect for institutions-the book spoke to me on many levels. I also write about truth, faith, and consequences. As a self-styled agnostic, I have tried to embrace the 'One God, Many Paths' philosophy, with mixed results.
I have lost a child. I have lost my faith. This story of redemption after loss is cathartic, a must-read.
Thanks to you, AW Schade.
As one who has struggled with faith-and developed a healthy disrespect for institutions-the book spoke to me on many levels. I also write about truth, faith, and consequences. As a self-styled agnostic, I have tried to embrace the 'One God, Many Paths' philosophy, with mixed results.
I have lost a child. I have lost my faith. This story of redemption after loss is cathartic, a must-read.
Thanks to you, AW Schade.
December 11, 2025
💯💯💯💯💯
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 14, 2025
A grieving dad embarks on a journey in AW Shade’s novel, The Shattered Mosaic: A father’s search for proof in a world of faith. Behind, he leaves the people he loves, the job, and everything else. Of course, life doesn’t wait for any man, as he immediately realizes. Even so, this man has questions for which he needs fact-based answers. He trots the globe, interviewing and writing in his journals, all the time disappointed because the answers he gets can’t pass his scrutiny. Is he framing his questions wrong? Or some questions don’t have answers, mysteries and are subject to one’s interpretation?
The question of what fate awaits man after death and whether God truly exists are approached from every angle in this book, be it religiously or scientifically. Religiously, Jacob goes to churches and mosques, where he’s assured his dead loved one awaits him in Heaven and that God watches over His creation, knows His people’s pain, such as Jacob’s. Scientifically, Jacob encounters a man on the train, who sits him down and explains death and God in straight, clear terms.
First, as a reader, I’m compelled to appreciate Schade’s work. This book is philosophically, religiously and scientifically rich. Earlier, I had wondered why take readers through 420 pages on a topic that could be answered in a mere page. However, as I read along, I began to see the light: to realize the book I’m holding in my hands is a convergence of ideas, an encyclopedia.
Grief affects us all, at some darkest moments in our lives, and while we’d get back to living at some point, Jacob doesn’t. I followed Jacob’s journey, knowing he’d give up at some point, especially after he received bad news from home and no tangible answers came his way, but Jacob defied the odds. His years as a lawyer make him the ideal person to engage men of the cloth and of science in constructive debate. And there are times when he annoys, because he wants faith to be explained to him as a lawyer would explain a crime in the courtroom, though his hosts are gentle and understanding people. As our protagonist here, I give Jacob a thumbs up.
Still on characters, Father Doyle impressed me. He’s patient, and above all, his friendship with Jacob remains true. I also like Arnold Kellner, a philosophy professor who briefly comes into Jacob’s life but leaves a great impression.
The words of Yasmin al-Khafaji still echo in my head: "You came seeking answers about God and your daughter. I gave you theology. But this hour, this laughter, this connection, perhaps this is the only proof we have that something transcends death. Love creating meaning between strangers."
Sarah’s story is illuminating as it explains why it’s important to hold onto hope even in the face of adversities.
To readers out there, read this book. It doesn’t matter your religion.
The question of what fate awaits man after death and whether God truly exists are approached from every angle in this book, be it religiously or scientifically. Religiously, Jacob goes to churches and mosques, where he’s assured his dead loved one awaits him in Heaven and that God watches over His creation, knows His people’s pain, such as Jacob’s. Scientifically, Jacob encounters a man on the train, who sits him down and explains death and God in straight, clear terms.
First, as a reader, I’m compelled to appreciate Schade’s work. This book is philosophically, religiously and scientifically rich. Earlier, I had wondered why take readers through 420 pages on a topic that could be answered in a mere page. However, as I read along, I began to see the light: to realize the book I’m holding in my hands is a convergence of ideas, an encyclopedia.
Grief affects us all, at some darkest moments in our lives, and while we’d get back to living at some point, Jacob doesn’t. I followed Jacob’s journey, knowing he’d give up at some point, especially after he received bad news from home and no tangible answers came his way, but Jacob defied the odds. His years as a lawyer make him the ideal person to engage men of the cloth and of science in constructive debate. And there are times when he annoys, because he wants faith to be explained to him as a lawyer would explain a crime in the courtroom, though his hosts are gentle and understanding people. As our protagonist here, I give Jacob a thumbs up.
Still on characters, Father Doyle impressed me. He’s patient, and above all, his friendship with Jacob remains true. I also like Arnold Kellner, a philosophy professor who briefly comes into Jacob’s life but leaves a great impression.
The words of Yasmin al-Khafaji still echo in my head: "You came seeking answers about God and your daughter. I gave you theology. But this hour, this laughter, this connection, perhaps this is the only proof we have that something transcends death. Love creating meaning between strangers."
Sarah’s story is illuminating as it explains why it’s important to hold onto hope even in the face of adversities.
To readers out there, read this book. It doesn’t matter your religion.
October 24, 2025
For anyone who has ever truly loved and lost, this book is for you. When your soul needs answers you can't rest. What do we really know for absolute certainty about our belief system? When you no longer except faith without proof. What makes us right and everyone else wrong? Gripping and Thought provoking.
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