Based on a true story that hints at the presence of miraculous grace, 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 monastery 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

 

Praise for Antonia Arslan’s internationally bestselling novel, Skylark Farm:

"In Arslan’s hands, the gruesome details of this tragedy are palliated by an old-fashioned story of redemption. . . . Skylark Farm is an affecting book." —New York Times Book Review

"Pertinent and provocative. . . . It's Arslan’s precise, vibrant description and sumptuous language that animate every facet of this world touched by death and terror. . . . A finely wrought elegy of her family’s survival." —Chicago Tribune

Antonia Arslan is an internationally bestselling author and essayist of Armenian origin. She has a degree in archaeology and was a professor of modern and contemporary Italian literature at the University of Padua.