The Illuminated Soul - Softcover

Stollman expands upon the themes he took up in his highly critically acclaimed award-winning debut, The Far Euphrates, opening the readers eyes to the mysteries of memory, obligations to the past, and the longings of the human heart. At the outbreak of World War II Eva Laquedem flees Prague carrying with her, at great risk, the renowned Augsburg Miscellany - a magnificent fifteenth-century manuscript that has been in her family for generations. After spending the war years in Japan she travels rootlessly until chance brings her to the town of Windsor, Canada, and to the home of Adele Ivri and her two sons. Eva is unlike anyone Adele and her sons have ever met. Her rare beauty and the dazzling tales she tells them - of her travels, of wondrous places and creatures, even of the dangers she faced during the war - change their lives, as do the exquisite illuminations contained within the pages of the Miscellany. The two boys, Joseph and Asa, fall in love with Eva, and as Joseph recounts the story and his love for her, and as the past begins to intrude upon the present, he finally reveals the novel's secret - the darkness to which we are all subject.

Aryeh Lev Stollman is a neuroradiologist whose first novel, The Far Euphrates, is an American Library Association Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Review Recommended Book of the Year, and the winner of a Wilbur Award and a Lambda Award.