My Armenian Friend by Andreï Makine

A heart-wrenching novel that is at once an indelible portrait of friendship, a coming-of-age tale, and a dive into the memory of the Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman Empire.

Siberia, early seventies. The narrator, a thirteen-year-old orphan, saves Vardan, a young Armenian boy, from discrimination and being attacked by fellow Soviet students in their schoolyard. A friendship is born.

When Vardan brings him home, the narrator enters a world of Armenian families living in the periphery of a prison where their husbands, sons, and fathers are detained. It is there, in the warmth of their home, that the narrator meets courage, love, and dignity—all of which will mark him for the rest of his life.

At first, only Vardan’s mysterious attacks of fever and pain, diagnosed simply as the “Armenian disease,” can separate the friends. But then an act of child’s play is suspected by the regime as aiding in an escape attempt from one of the nearby camps.

My Armenian Friend powerfully conjures a double nostalgia: that of an isolated Armenian community for their native country, and that of a boy for his childhood friend.

Andreï Makine is an internationally bestselling author. He is the winner of the Goncourt Prize and the Médicis Prize, the two highest literary awards in France, for his novel Dreams of My Russian Summers, which was also a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Makine was born in Siberia in 1957 and raised in the Soviet Union. Granted asylum in France in 1987, Makine was personally given French citizenship by President Jacques Chirac. He now lives in Paris, France. Arcade Publishing has published eleven of Makine’s acclaimed novels in English.