In a world of 24-hour news coverage and global forces like the U.N., genocides still happen, often unchecked. But nearly a century ago, one group, the Armenians, was nearly wiped out in a systematic coup that became the blueprint for Hitler, who said to his generals, "Go, kill without mercy men, women and children of the Polish race or language. Only in this way will we get the living space we need. Who, after all, remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?" Zeyneb Sosi Arta is only seven years old when she is stoned by a group of village children, who taunt her with cries of "infidel." This incident spurs her parents to move her to the safey of the city to stay with the Reijskinds, sympathetic friends. After all, though Sosi's father is Turkish, her mother is Armenian, and although many years have passed, they haven?t forgotten the systematic extermination of Armenians at the hands of the Turks that began in 1915. Before it was over in 1923, 1.5 million Armenians would be dead. Their homes and wealth appropriated, they were rounded up, deported, tortured and murdered in concentration camps or shipped to the desert of Der Zor to die of starvation. The genocide was planned and directed by the Young Turks under the cover of war and it was months before any news filtered back to the cities about the fate of those who had disappeared. In the safety of the Reijskinds? home, Sosi waits in vain for her parents to come back for her; only to discover they have been murdered by their own neighbours. Sosi is raised by the Reijskinds, and later moves with them to Jerusalem, where she meets a Ara, a radical young Armenian photographer. Sosi becomes pregnant with Ara's child, and they subsquently wed. But Ara is desperate to go to Turkey, to force the Turks to admit to their extermination of his people, to document the disappearance of the Armenians. Ara disappears himself. Sosi moves to Montreal with their daughter Sammi, where eventually Ara rejoins her after being found in a Turkish prison by another relative who pays for his release. The realities of war, genocide and global immigration and their impact on susequent generations are revealed through the story of Sosi: a survivor, a traveller, a mother, an Armenian.

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Originally from Weyburn, Saskatchewan, Linda Ghan is an accomplished author of fiction, drama and journalism. Her first novel, A Gift of Sky, had two editions in Canada as well as publication in translation in Japan. Her children's story, Muhla, The Fair One, was commissioned and performed by Montreal's Black Theatre Workshop and published by Nuage Editions. Ghan moved to Japan in 1996 and published many articles for Japanese dailies and the non-fiction book Gaston Petit: The Kimono and the Cross, before returning to fiction with Sosi.