The Shepherd and the Wolf

On the sixth day of a war that ends while he is in the air, an Israeli reserve pilot is shot down over Jordan.

In a cell in Amman he is told, by a tired man in a clean uniform holding an almost empty folder, that he may be the last Jew alive. He is shown no list, no photograph and no name. He does not ask for one.

Then the delegations come. A monsignor with a cold. A sheikh who refuses, three times, to make the thing he is asking for sound smaller than it is. They want one sentence from him, said aloud, naming which of them inherits a people who are gone. Both of them offer him his life. Both of them offer to save the books. Both of them are telling the truth.

Neither of them is a monster, and that is the difficulty.

The Shepherd and the Wolf is a novel about a man of no particular faith asked to sign away a tradition he barely practised — by good men, with good arguments, at the one moment in history when there is nobody left to ask whether he is permitted to.

First lines

A shepherd may be negligent tending his flock, allowing a wolf to eat one of the sheep. People will always kill the wolf, never blame the shepherd.
— Ronald C. Orovan

Part One · The Sky · 1 · Doves

There were four of them out on the apron, walking in the heat that came up off the concrete, stopping and starting the way doves do, attending to things that were not there.

Then the siren went, and they were gone — up and out over the eucalyptus at the edge of the field, all four in the same half second, as though the sound had lifted them rather than frightened them.

Joel watched them go. It was the fourth siren since morning and the second in an hour, and by now it meant nothing except that somebody at a console had done the correct thing.

How this book came to be

A note from the author, printed at the back of the book.

While clearing out an apartment I discovered an unpublished screenplay, written nearly forty years earlier — The Man Who Fell to Earth — along with notebooks, research materials, fragments of dialogue, theological questions, and pages of ideas surrounding the story.

They were Ronald C. Orovan's. He died on August 2, 2026.

He had kept everything. Boxes of paper going back to the 1980s. Forty years of road maps. Telephone directories nobody had opened. Moving boxes still taped shut, with his family's things in them, never unpacked.

What I found was not the novel you have just read. But within those pages was its foundation: a man facing an impossible choice, questions of faith and survival, and Ronald's persistent interest in what people and institutions are capable of doing when they believe the greater good is at stake.

The title of this book is his. It is a line from one of the notebooks, and it stands at the front.

I took Ronald's original concept and writings and began developing them into something larger. Characters were expanded and created, the world and circumstances were rebuilt, the story was restructured, and the underlying questions were developed into this novel.

I should say plainly how it was made, since this is a book about a statement put out in a man's name. The concept was Ronald's. The story is mine — what happens and in what order, what is invented and what is refused, where it ends. The prose was written with generative AI, working from my outlines and under my direction, and every line of it was read, argued with, and kept or cut by me.

The Shepherd and the Wolf is my work, but it would not exist without Ronald's.

I am grateful that I had the opportunity to find what he left behind — and to carry his ideas somewhere he never had the chance to take them.

— Michael R. Vollmer