While she looks, a dove comes and settles on her hands. The novel has moments of startling beauty: in an abandoned Roman village Yael discovers a place speckled with the bones of birds, thrown down to tell the future and 'so hollow the wind made a song of them'. The dovekeepers are spurred to resilience by determination to protect those whom they love.

While men's magic is public – the exorcisms of priests, the magic of sages – that of women is a secret thing, practised 'behind locked doors'. Amid the dusty rocks of the desert she paints a world where women, though stripped of power, are not powerless, and strong women are mistrusted, even feared, as 'prophetesses or witches'. Hoffman is a writer of great perception and she captures with precision the complexity of the relationships between the women, their fear and guilt, their courage, their hunger for consolation and companionship. It does not keep us from hoping with them that they still might survive to alter them. That we know from Josephus how the story must end only adds to the sense, so strongly shared by the women themselves, that their fates are already decided.

Their decisions are directed by prophecies and by dreams, their faith sustained by miracles. The dovekeepers' lives are punctuated by prayers, curses and omens. This is a world in which trust in the immutability of one's destiny is matched by the desperate belief that the right magic can change the future. In AD70, Hoffman's characteristic elision of the magical and the quotidian finds its spiritual home. The work is humble and dirty but, amid the filth and noise of the birdhouses, the women grow close, their lives becoming inextricably bound together. These women are drawn together by their work as Masada's dovekeepers, collecting the birds' eggs and gathering their droppings to fertilise the fortress's orchards.

Aziza was raised as a boy and a warrior, and her mother, Shirah, is reputed to be a witch. Revka watched as Roman soldiers brutally raped and murdered her daughter. Yael, whose mother died in childbirth, is treated like a 'dog' by her father. It is narrated by four women, all of whom have endured terrible suffering before finding asylum at the fortress. Though archaeological digs at Masada have since cast considerable doubt on Josephus's account, Hoffman's novel adheres to that version of events.

The dovekeepers novel