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Angels v. Angel-Human Hybrids: Trussoni's Angelopolis

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For those who are intrigued by Dan Brown’sAngels and Demons and Elizabeth Kostova’s The HistorianDanielleTrussoni’s trilogy,Angelology, might be a great addition to the summer reading list.

Her first book in the series, Angelology, was published in 2011. The next book, Angelolopolis, came out this March.

Art historian V.A. Verlaine and young nun Evangeline are woven together once again by Trussoni in the latest installment. The two protagonists find themselves again taken up in the battle between a secret society of angelologists and Nephillim, angel-human hybrids, who are led by the angel Eno.

But Trussoni says readers should expect some surprises.

“You have to keep the momentum going, you have to make it interesting, you have to renew the characters, you have make a new story,” says Trussoni on writing the sequel.

This book takes place ten decades after the first, and it begins in Paris. Verlaine has gone through rigorous training to become an angel hunter. The Nephillim are stirring trouble again, but this time they want to create their own paradise called Angelopolis. Evangeline, who is not as featured in this book as in the last one, is captured by the Nephillim and that gets Verlaine much more involved.

When the Nephillim travel from Paris to St. Petersburg, Verlaine is brought to the time of the Romanov reign. Trussoni researched to bring historical accuracy and authenticity to the tale.

Danielle Trussoni

“Fact was very important when I was constructing this universe, and there are a lot of moments in both of the books when I used history to create sort of a tableau on which supernatural events can occur,” she says.

As such, Trussoni categorizes this trilogy as historical and supernatural rather than fantasy. If anything, she believes that this book would fall into a “fantastical” genre, the combination of fantasy and historical. By using a well-researched background on the Romanov history, that allowed Trussoni to play around with the “characters’ interpretation” of the time and place.