The prolific and captivating Chris Bohjalian has done it all with The Sandcastle Girls. “It takes a talented novelist to combine fully ripened characters, an engrossing storyline, exquisite prose and set it against a horrific historical backdrop-in this case, the Armenian Genocide-and completely enchant readers.

This leads Laura to investigate her family history, where she finds love, great loss, and a long-buried secret. The novel also tells the present day story of New York novelist, Laura Petrosian, who hasn’t thought much about her Armenian heritage until learning of a newspaper photo of her grandmother. Armen joins the British army, but begins to write letters to Elizabeth, realizing his love for her. ISBN-13: 9780307743916 Summary In his fifteenth book, The Sandcastle Girls, Chris Bohjalian takes us to a time and placeSyria, 1915that left haunting legacies for his Armenian heritage, making this his most personal novel to date.

Elizabeth becomes friends with a young Armenian man, Armen, whose wife and infant daughter have been killed in the genocide. The Sandcastle Girls Chris Bohjalian, 2012 Knopf Doubleday 320 pp. His characters take the reader back in time to Syria, and he recreates with astounding detail the tragedies faced by the Armenian people during the first modern genocide of the twentieth century.Įlizabeth Endicott, a young nurse, travels to Aleppo, Syria in 1915, as a volunteer helping to provide food and medical attention to refugees of the Armenian Genocide. Though The Sandcastle Girls is a novel, author Chris Bohjalian (and fictional narrator Laura Petrosian) based their storytelling on meticulous research. In The Sandcastle Girls, Bohjalian creates an intergenerational tale firmly founded in the history of the Armenian Genocide.

The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian