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  • Published: 15 March 2011
  • ISBN: 9780307280466
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $32.99

The Bread of Angels

A Journey to Love and Faith



Eat, Pray, Love meets Shutterbabe in this dazzling memoir of love and faith in the Syrian desert. FIRST TIME IN PAPERBACK. ANCHOR.

A riveting memoir about one woman's journey into Syria under the Baathist regime and an unexpected love story between two strangers searching for meaning.
 
When Stephanie Saldaña arrives in Damascus, she is running away from a broken heart and a haunted family history that she has crossed the world to escape. Yet as she moves into a tumbling Ottoman house in the heart of the Old City, she is unprepared for the complex world that awaits her: an ancient capital where Sunni and Shia Muslims, Christians, Alawites, Kurds, and Palestinian and Iraqi refugees share a fragile co-existence.

Soon she is stumbling through the Arabic language, fielding interviews from the secret police, and struggling to make the city her own. But as the political climate darkens and the war in neighboring Iraq threatens to spill over, she flees to an ancient Christian monastery carved into the desert cliffs, where she is forced to confront the life she left behind. Soon she will meet a series of improbable teachers: an iconoclastic Italian priest, a famous female Muslim sheikh, a wounded Iraqi refugee, and Frédéric, a young French novice monk who becomes her best friend.

What follows is a tender story of a woman falling in love: with God, with her own life, with a country on the brink of chaos, and with a man she knows she can never have. Wise, funny, and heartbreaking, The Bread of Angels celebrates the hope that appears even in war, the surprising places we can call home, and the possibility of true love.

  • Published: 15 March 2011
  • ISBN: 9780307280466
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $32.99

Praise for The Bread of Angels

"[A] poignant memoir about hitting rock bottom in love and faith. . . . Saldaña's words sing. They are inspired and powerful. . . . This is a fresh courageous book that gives new meaning to the word memoir." --Dallas Morning News

"Not only a diary of one woman's quest to find her place in the world, [The Bread of Angels] serves as a map for the rest of us. At the same time, it is a fascinating, back-alley travelogue of contemporary Damascus, as well as journey to the core of the Quran. Most of all, it is an inspiring document of battle-tested faith." --San Antonio Express-News