The title is deceptive, as this is no lightweight beach read but a serious novel. Through Elizabeth and Armen’s travels and travails, we are taken from the battleground of Gallipoli to the concentration camp of Dar-El-Zor, meeting missionaries, soldiers, and victims along the way.īohjalian (three of his four Armenian grandparents died in the genocide and war) resists caricature and presents this appalling history largely through the eyes of its victims and those who valiantly try to help them. Written by Chris Bohjalian Review by Marina Maxwell. 1.5 million Armenians were killed and starved in the deserts and near Aleppo. The curious and rebellious young woman and the haunted and melancholy young man come together in an inevitable romance. The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian is historical fiction about an author who tries to find information about her grandparents during the Armenian genocide done by the Turks in 1915. Having been separated from his wife and baby during the insurgency against the Turks in the city of Van, he has come to Aleppo in the apparently futile hope of finding his deported family. Through them, Elizabeth meets their friend Armen Petrosian, an Armenian engineer.

Shooting images of the dead and dying Armenians are two German soldiers, whose government is allied with the Ottoman Empire.Īppalled by what their leaders are condoning, the soldiers systematically and seditiously document the carnage in the hope that by revealing it, they can stop it. Over the course of his career, New York Times bestselling novelist Chris Bohjalian has taken readers on a spectacular array of journeys. Bohjalian succeeds in depicting the horror, without sentimentalizing it, using photographs as one of the book’s major plot devices. The Sandcastle Girls A Novel By: Chris Bohjalian Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Alison Fraser Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins 4.2 (788 ratings) Try for 0.

That detailed, clinical language works to great effect.