Avishag

Avishag was a young woman from Shunem who attends the elderly King David in the biblical narrative. After David’s death, Adonijah’s request to marry her is interpreted by Solomon as a political claim to the throne.

Geraldine Brooks’s The Secret Chord places Avishag within a narrative shaped by political ambition and government, crime, espionage and covert power, and court politics and dynastic power.