Knowledge Of Angels: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize - Softcover

Paton Walsh, Jill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0552997803 ISBN 13: 9780552997805

Publisher: Black Swan, 1998

Synopsis

THE EXQUISITE PHILOSOPHOCAL FABLE, SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE

'This remarkable novel resembles an illuminated manuscript mapped with angels and mountains and signposts, an allegory for today and yesterday too. A beautiful, unsettling moral fiction about virtue and intolerance' Observer

At opposite ends of Grandinsula, a remote pre-reformation Christian island, shepherds find a creature with strange footprints stealing their lambs, and fishermen find a swimmer near exhaustion struggling towards the shore.

The child cannot stand, eat or speak like a human being; the swimmer says he is a prince in the unheard of land of Aclar, and declares himself to be an atheist.

Severo, Cardinal-Prince of the island, is confronted by a double conundrum. Could an atheist be received in good faith? Not if the knowledge of God is inborn and he has reneged it. If he is a renegade from the truth, he must be burned as a heretic; but Severo would dearly like to save him.

And what of the feral child, abandoned by her mother and suckled by wolves, who knows nothing of the precarious relationship between Church and State? Does she, in fact, have a soul to save?

Her innocence will become the subject of a dangerous experiment, a philosophical game of chess that soon turns into a matter of life and death...

'A compelling medieval fable, written from the heart and melded to a driving narrative which never once loses its tremendous pace' Guardian

'Remarkable...Utterly absorbing...richly detailed and finely imagined' Sunday Telegraph

(Shortlisted Booker Prize 1994)

About this title

About the Author

Jill Paton Walsh was educated at St Michael's Convent, North Finchley, and at St Anne's College, Oxford. She is the author of several highly praised adult novels: Lapsing, A School For Lovers, Knowledge of Angels, which was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize, Goldengrove Unleaving, The Serpentine Cave and A Desert in Bohemia. She has also won many awards for her children's literature, including the Whitbread Prize, the Universe Prize and the Smarties Award. She has three children and lives in Cambridge.

From the Back Cover

It is, perhaps, the fifteenth century and the ordered tranquillity of a Mediterranean island is about to be shattered by the appearance of two outsiders: one, a castaway, plucked from the sea by fishermen, whose beliefs represent a challenge to the established order; the other, a child abandoned by her mother and suckled by wolves, who knows nothing of the precarious relationship between Church and State but whose innocence will become the subject of a dangerous experiment.

But the arrival of the Inquisition on the island creates a darker, more threatening force which will transform what has been a philosophical game of chess into a matter of life and death...

Edition details

• Publisher: Black Swan
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0552997803
• ISBN 13: 9780552997805
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288