by D. M. Thomas
First published 1983
Gorky Arshakian receives a phone call that changes everything. His elderly aunt in Boston wants to tell him the story their family never speaks about. She begins to recount what happened to their people in 1915, when Ottoman forces drove Armenians from their homes toward the desert. As his aunt's voice carries across the phone lines, Gorky finds himself pulled between two worlds. He lives as a successful writer in London, but her words transport him to the deportation trains and refugee camps where his grandparents struggled to survive. The stories multiply and contradict each other. Different voices tell different versions of the same events. Gorky realizes that memory itself becomes unreliable when it carries such weight. He must decide whether to write about what he learns, knowing that some truths resist telling. The past refuses to stay buried.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, 21st-century
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: dual-timeline, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Boston, London, Ottoman Empire
Period: 1915
191 pages · Hardcover · Gollancz
Content warnings: war