Ravens before Noah - by Susanna Harutyunyan (Paperback)

About the Book

This novel is set in the Armenian mountains sometime in 1915-1960. An old man and a new born baby boy escape from the Hamidian massacres in Turkey in 1894 and hide themselves in the ruins of a demolished and abandoned village.

Book Synopsis

This novel is set in the Armenian mountains sometime in 1915-1960. An old man and a new born baby boy escape from the Hamidian massacres in Turkey in 1894 and hide themselves in the ruins of a demolished and abandoned village. The village soon becomes a shelter for many others, who flee from problems with the law, their families, or their past lives. The villagers survive in this secret shelter, cut off from the rest of the world, by selling or bartering their agricultural products in the villages beneath the mountain.

Years pass by, and the child saved by the old man grows into a young man, Harout. He falls for a beautiful girl who arrived in the village after being tortured by Turkish soldiers. She is pregnant and the old women of the village want to kill the twin baby girls as soon as they are born, to wash away the shame...

Review Quotes

"While Harutyunyan is technically a realist writer, there is something mythical about her characters, so extreme are they. They have been deformed, stretched out, bent if you will, by history and by the veritably strange lives that their isolation and village ways have imposed on them." Christopher Atamian, The Armenian Mirror-Spectator

"[I]t is a compelling read, with the eternal story of displacement and dispossession at its heart. The young woman becomes emblematic of women's sufferings in war and the stigma and shame they are forced to carry as a result of male violence and societal prejudice. A valuable insight into Armenian history and culture." Mandy Jenkinson, Historical Novel Society