A wonderfully paced first novel about a Turkish family haunted by the Armenian genocide, and their own unsuspected past.

Nine summons all her children and grandchildren to her side to free herself of the burden of an inconvenient truth she has carried all her life: they are not a purely Turkish Muslim family as they’d believed themselves to be, but are of Christian Armenian descent. The news hits them all hard, but it is her sassy young grand-daughter Sibel, a reporter for CNN Istanbul, who is the most affected by the news.

The book intersperses chapters set in modern-day Istanbul with the unforgettable story of a heroic act performed by Sibel’s great-grandfather in the early days of World War I. A young doctor from Sivas, part of historic Armenia, Ragip is called to duty only to realize that his mission is more about helping a group of Ottoman soldiers carry out a mission of death than it is to saving lives. During his first inspection of the languishing prisoners, an infant is thrust into his arms even as its mother is shot by suspicious guards. His choice to run and desert the army leads him on a peripatetic and dangerous journey to safety across an unfamiliar and abandoned landscape, the infant in arms.

Orhan Pamuk’s winning the Nobel Prize in Literature brings a timeliness to this novel, which goes a good distance towards explaining the context for his condemnation through Article 301 of the Turkish penal code.