City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

Bone ash sky, Katerina Cosgrove

eng

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fiction

Bone ash sky

Katerina Cosgrove

Bone Ash Sky is the sweeping story of an American journalist who goes home to unravel four generations of war and genocide, love and renewal, in Turkish Armenia and modern-day Lebanon. When Anoush Pakradounian steps off a boat and feels Levantine heat on her cheek like a caress, she thinks she knows where she's going: she thinks she knows who's right and who's wrong. Yet nothing about her family's past is black and white. In 1915 one million Armenians were marched into Syria by Turks and killed in the first genocide of the twentieth century. In 1982 Beirut came under siege for three months and 18,000 civilians died, while another 30,000 were wounded. Anoush's quest for answers is interwoven with the memory of ruined cities and vanished empires: Lake Van before the genocide, Beirut in civil war, Ottoman villas and desecrated churches, Palestinian refugee camps and torture chambers turned into nightclubs. Her search to find out the truth about her father, her grandparents and her own place in the story spans four generations and massive upheavals in the Middle East. With echoes of Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, Thomas Keneally's Schindler's List and Geraldine Brooks' The People of the Book, Bone Ash Sky is a powerful work that examines family, loyalty, love and secrets long-hidden in the horror of war and displacement