Keynote
An inspiring and uplifting novel for all ages
Selling points

• Awarded Best Book of the Year (1999) by the Polish section of IBBY
• A book that wears its heart on its sleeve

Description
What happens when you watch your guardian angel battle a black angel and
then fall from the sky? If you’re five-year-old Ewa, the protagonist of Where the
Angels Fall, you fail to convince your parents of what you saw, and then watch
your life fall apart, as one piece of bad luck after another comes your way. And
only when you’ve hit rock bottom, picking up a serious case of leukemia, do
your parents believe you, and join you in the search for a feather dropped by
your angel. If you’re Dorota Terakowska, one of Poland’s most beloved popular
literary writers, you use this remarkable premise as an occasion to tackle some
very large questions about the nature of Good and Evil, the distance between
heaven and earth, and the depth of family love. You manage to suspend
ambiguity for the course of the novel as to whether the angels and magical
events are meant to be understood metaphorically, or whether we are to believe
the world is one where fantastical things happen. And as if this were somehow
insufficient, you add a profound knowledge of angel lore and tie the whole
thing in to Bulgakov’s Master and Margerita through direct quotes and thematic
crossover. Ten years later on, When the Angels Fall seems fresher and more
intriguing than ever.

Dorota Terakowska falls into that rare and admirable category of writers
who smuggle contents of real importance in their chosen convention.
Ewa Nowacka, Nowe Książki, 7/99

Where the Angels Fall is literature of the highest caliber. It may even be the finest
piece in Terakowska’s enormously appreciated oeuvre.
Michał Zając, Guliwer 6/1999