"Trenchant...crisp and suspenseful...Strong renderings of Armenia's national nightmare..." Kirkus Reviews A historical novel set in the final years of the Ottoman Empire amid the throes of the Armenian Genocide, told through the experiences of a young boy. Aran Pirian, the twelve year old son of an academician father and musician mother living in 1915 Constantinople, had all of life's essentials and more. Aran and his younger sister, Anahid, though, were unaware of what was about to come as World War I and a Turkish nationalist movement intent on ethnic cleansing intervened and subsumed their lives. A knock on the door of their home and the abrupt seizure by Ottoman soldiers of Aran's father, Hovan, marked the beginning of events which forced Aran, Anahid, and their mother, Marem, on a harrowing journey. With the assistance of Hovan's Turkish friend and colleague, Professor Daigneau, Aran and his family are placed in hiding. Later found and imprisoned in a death camp, then sent into the desert borderlands in an attempt to find an escape with a caravan of Armenian refugees, Aran and his family sought sustenance wherever it could be found-in a crumb of bread, in a bite of fig, in a stalk of wild wheat, and in their few most cherished items stored in a family trunk. Will it be enough sustenance to survive? Could it all be so plain and simple, or is living and dying a more complex matter? Aran would have no choice in finding out.