**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.
