Winner of the PEN/Albrand Award
A
New York Times
Notable Book
From a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a memoir of family secrets, survival, and growing up in the shadow of the Armenian genocide
“A fascinating and affecting memoir….Written with great sensitivity,
Black Dog of Fate
is at once a family memoir, a history of the extermination of the Armenians in Turkey, and the story of a young man’s passage into adulthood.”—
New York Times Book Review
In this prize-winning classic memoir,
-bestselling author Peter Balakian explores his suburban childhood and charts his slow uncovering of the truth of what happened to his family during the Armenian Genocide. In describing his awakening to the facts of history, Balakian introduces us to a remarkable family of matriarchs and merchants, physicians, a bishop, and his aunts, two well-known figures in the world of literature. The unforgettable central figure of the story is Balakian's grandmother, a survivor and widow of the Genocide who speaks in fragments of metaphor and myth as she cooks up Armenian delicacies, plays the stock market, and keeps track of the baseball stats of her beloved Yankees. The book is infused with the intense and often comic collision between this family's ancient Near Eastern traditions and the American pop culture of the '50s and '60s.
Balakian moves with ease from childhood memory, to history, to his ancestors' lives, to the story of his own coming of age. Written with power and grace,
is a tale of survival against enormous odds.