No Graven Image

No Graven Image (Harper & Row, 1966) is Elisabeth Elliot's only novel. Its heroine, Margaret Sparhawk, is a young American missionary who goes to the high Andes of Ecuador to serve the people there. The story follows her as she adjusts to a foreign culture, travels through the mountains, visits wary households and slowly earns the trust of the people, until a tragedy involving one of the families she has come to love overturns what she believed her work would be. Elliot drew on her own early years as a missionary in Ecuador, and the novel's title, taken from the commandment against images, frames its questions about what a missionary expects of God. It was reissued by Crossway in 1982 and later by other publishers, and was included in a 1997 omnibus with her first two books.