In 1915, Elizabeth Endicott travels from Boston to Aleppo with a relief committee to provide food and medical aid to Armenian refugees. There, she witnesses the systemic starvation and deportation of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire. She forms a connection with Armen, a young Armenian engineer who has lost his wife and daughter to the killings and eventually enlists in the British army. Generations later, their granddaughter Laura investigates her family history in New York, uncovering old photographs that link her ancestors to the atrocities of the genocide.
Readers of historical fiction choose this book to understand the specific mechanics of the Armenian Genocide through an intimate lens. It appeals to those interested in how wartime trauma remains embedded in family lineages over a century. The reader finishes the book with a concrete timeline of the 1915 massacres and a clear view of how survivors reconstructed their identities in the diaspora. It provides a factual foundation for a period of history often omitted from Western textbooks.
- Published
- 2012
- Language
- EN
