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Knowledge Of Angels
  • Published: 1 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446423042
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

Knowledge Of Angels

Formats & editions
EBook
1 June 2011
Paperback
1 Feb 1998
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A beautiful, magical novel.

THE EXQUISITE PHILOSOPHOCAL FABLE, SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE

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...

'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

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

(Shortlisted Booker Prize 1994)
  • Published: 1 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446423042
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288
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About the author

Jill Paton Walsh

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.
JPW

Also by Jill Paton Walsh

A Parcel of Patterns
A Desert In Bohemia
The Serpentine Cave
See all

Praise for Knowledge Of Angels

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

Guardian

'An irresistible blend of intellect and passion'

Mail on Sunday

'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

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

Sunday Telegraph

'The lucidity of Jill Paton Walsh's style and the dexerity of the narrative are such that her book reads more like a good thriller than a weighty novel of ideas...An ingenious fable'

The Times