A Summer without Dawn Book

"In the summer of 1915, days after the government orders the deportation of the Armenians, journalist Vartan Balian, an Armenian, is imprisoned by politicians hoping to silence him. Soon, after a daring escape, he embarks on an odyssey across the vast empire in desperate search of his wife, Maro, and their young son Tomas, whose own stories we gradually learn. In the ensuing years the Balians will each confront the calamities of war as well as the secrets of the human heart." A Summer without Dawn is a compelling story about a family swept up in one of history's darkest moments, and a moving portrait of a people's unbreakable will to survive.

Publishers Weekly

In this sweeping, well-crafted historical, Canadian authors Hacikyan and Soucy recreate the 1915 Armenian genocide through the eyes of a young family. When orders come down to leave their Muslim-Christian town of Sivas (to "purify Anatolia of foreigners"), Vartan Balian--a 38-year-old Armenian medical officer in the Ottoman army and a former writer of revolutionary Armenian history--must decide how to follow the sultan's dictates and also protect his wife, Maro, and their six-year-old son, Tomas. Before he can make his move, however, Vartan is arrested in conjunction with a failed Armenian rebellion, while Maro and Tomas are forced into a wretched convoy of deportees. Saved from execution by his boyhood friends, Vartan assumes the identity of a Turkish lieutenant and goes on the run. Meanwhile, Maro and Tomas are seized by a Turkish governor and pressed into his polygamous harem. Though somewhat didactic, this richly textured work is exciting and horrifying, infused with lust, betrayal, vengeance, and plenty of bloody mayhem. (July)