Skylark Farm
By Geoffrey Brock (Translator); Antonia Arslan
(Knopf, Hardcover, 9781400044351, 288pp.)
Publication Date: January 23, 2007
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook
Categories: Literary
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A beautiful, wrenching debut novel chronicling the life of a family struggling for survival during the Armenian genocide in Turkey, in 1915.
At the center: Yerwant, who, at thirteen, left his home in the Anatolian hills of Turkey to study at an Armenian boarding school in Venice. Now, in May 1915, after forty years, he is planning a long-awaited reunion with his family at their homestead, Skylark Farm. But while joyful preparations for Yerwant’s arrival are being made in the town of his birth, Italy enters the Great War and closes its borders. At the same time, in Turkey, Yerwant’s family begins a brutal odyssey of forced marches and prison camps, hunger and humiliation at the hands of the Young Turks who are determined to rid their nation of minorities. In the unfolding story we follow Yerwant’s family as it struggles to survive and as four of its children set out on a dangerous and daring course of their own: to reach Yerwant, and safety, in Italy.
Antonia Arslan draws on the story of her own family to tell the story of Skylark Farm. She has transformed the “obscure memories” that are her heritage into a novel as lyrical and poignant as a fable.
Antonia Arslan, who lives in Padua, has a degree in archaeology and was professor of modern and contemporary Italian literature at the University of Padua. This is her first novel.
“Heartbreaking. . . . Powerfully unflinching. . . . Skylark Farm operates like [an Armenian] Schindler's List; it's a story of hope that makes it easier for us to confront the horror of what happens when evil is allowed to run unchecked.” —The Christian Science Monitor
“In Arslan's hands, the gruesome details of this tragedy are palliated by an old-fashioned story of redemption. . . . Skylark Farm is an affecting book.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Pertinent and provocative . . . It's Arslan's precise, vibrant description and sumptuous language that animate every facet of this world touched by death and terror. . . . A finely wrought elegy of her family's survival.” —Chicago Tribune
“A powerful account. . . . In the end, [survival tempers] the story with transforming heroism.” —Bloomberg
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