THREE APPLES FELL FROM HEAVEN

By Micheline Aharonian Marcom

Here is a novel of import and style, set in 1915 - 1917, the years of the Ottoman Turkish government's brutal campaign that resulted in the deaths of more than a million Armenians. Through a series of chapters that have the weight and economy of poetry, Micheline Ahronian Marcom introduces us to the stories of Anaguil, and Armenian girl taken in by Turkish neighbors after the death of her parents who now views the remains of her world through a Muslim veil; Sargis, a poet hidden away in his mother's attic, dressed in women's clothing, and steadily going mad; Lucine, a servant and lover of the American consul; Maritsa, a rage-filled Muslim wife who becomes a whore; and Dickran, an infant left behind under a tree on the long exodus from and Armenian village, who reaches with tiny hands to touch the stars and dies with his name unrecorded. Through these lives, we witness the vanishing of a people.

Three Apples Fell from Heaven is an elegy to the final days of Orientalism and an elegant memorial to the victims of the twentieth century's first genocide. Together, the stories of these lives form a narrative mosaic--faceted, complex, richly textured a devastating tableau.

Riverhead Books (2001).