Silent Angel by Antonia Arslan

Silent Angel by Antonia Arslan

Based on a true story that hints at the presence of miraculous grace, The Silent Angel is a powerful account of human resilience and heroic faith set against the backdrop of the massacre of Christians during the Armenian Genocide.

This tale opens up with a scene of carnage and devastation, from the ruins of a monstary to lifeless bodies--the doings of an army of young Turks. Silent Angel follows the story of five survivors: three women, a child, and a Greek monk. They are forced to wander through the deserted Valley of Moush in search of a new life and a better destiny than their Armenian brothers.

During the most painful moment of their lives, they become guardians of a book of inestimable value, the Book of Moush, an ancient illuminated manuscript. Believing the book to be a talisman of sorts, they vow to bring the book to safety, even to defend it with their own lives. Antonia Arslan tells this story with intense compassion and clarity, taking the reader on a desperate search for truth and salvation.

There is a reason why it has come into their hands. It means that the angels who watched over it decided to give it not to wise priests, who touched it 'with immaculate hands' as the liturgy proclaims, but expressly to them, this small company of three women, a boy, and a man, fleeing toward the mountains, and united by chance among the ruins of the monastery.
-- From The Silent Angel

Antonia Arslan (born 1938) is an Italian writer and academic of Armenian origins. Arslan was born in Padua. After graduating in archaeology she became a professor of modern and contemporary Italian literature at the University of Padua and published copious groundbreaking studies, inter alia, on Italian popular fiction and Italian women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her most recent publications have focused on her Armenian heritage. She translated two volumes of Daniel Varujan's poetry into Italian and edited works on the Armenian genocide and on the experiences of Armenian refugees in Italy. Her first novel, La masseria delle allodole, was published in 2004 by Rizzoli, and it appeared in English in 2007 as Skylark Farm, translated by Geoffrey Brock and published by Knopf. Drawing on the history of her own recent ancestors it tells of the attempts of the members of an Armenian family caught up in the Armenian Genocide to escape to Italy and join a relation who had been living there for forty years. The book has been translated into numerous languages and inspired the Taviani brothers' 2007 film La Masseria Delle Allodole. Her second novel, La Strada di Smirne, was published in 2009 by Rizzoli, and it appeared in Armenian as Smyrniani Janabar in 2012. Arslan's more recent publications include Ishtar2: cronache dal mio risveglio (2009) published by Rizzoli, and chronicles her brush with death in 2009, Il cortile dei girasoli parlanti published by Piemme Edizioni in 2011, and Il libro di Mush published by Skira in 2012. The latter book is an account of the Msho Charantir, the largest surviving Armenian manuscript. It won the prestigious Premio Giuria Viareggio.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781950939138
ISBN 10	1950939138
Title	Silent Angel
Author	Antonia Arslan
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Ignatius Press
Year published	2020-04-27
Number of pages	136
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable