The Last Prophecy of Baba Vanga

Book excerpt: The Last Prophecy of Baba Vanga is an illustrated, space action romance with a spiritual twist.The action takes place in the year 2029 when 29-year-old Maya Najour, NASA's first female Muslim-Christian astronaut, is given command of the NAUTILUS, the successor to the International Space Station. On its maiden mission, the station encounters "the mother of all meteor storms" from Comet Pavlova 2 (discovered by Maya's mother, Mila, an amateur astronomer). Maya loses her sight when she is 10 years old after seeing a stork in her dream. Two years later, she encounters a stork again, this time talking with the voice of the famous, blind Bulgarian prophetess, Baba Vanga, who cures Maya's blindness and reveals her last prophesy about the "visitors from Vamtim." Vanga passes on her gift of prophecy to Maya, who as an adult, experiences "waking nightmares" that foreshadow world events. Layla, Maya's 12-year-old daughter, also inherits the "gift" and paints the visions she sees in her dreams, which, most recently, are ice-encrusted landscapes. Her prophetic paintings are found throughout the book. Maya and her international crew have been given a critical mission: Stop the three mysterious objects named the TRIAD from colliding with the Earth. A Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic causes the crew's Dragon-X shuttle launch at Cape Canaveral to get scrubbed, which forces the crew to take the slower-paced space elevator. Maya is also dealing with another "TRIAD," deciding on who she really loves: her estranged husband Marco, a Cuban-American journalist, who went missing on his way to cover Cuba's first multi-party elections; her new boyfriend, Ivan Petrenko, 21 years her senior; or her best friend, Gabrielle Sevigny, an astrobotanist. What's inside those mysterious objects hurtling toward the Earth, and will the crew be able to stop them in time, or will they hit the planet and turn it into a giant snowball from an "impact winter?" The fate of the world is riding upon the shoulders of the 5-ft-8-inch, 12-year-old Layla, who finds herself in a unique position to solve the mystery and help the crew stop the TRIAD.