Crossing the Euphrates

CROSSING THE EUPHRATES is a wonderfully readable and moving historical novel, bringing to life a too often forgotten, century old story with vivid immediacy. It tells the harrowing escape and survival of a man who lost everyone and everything during the first genocide of the 20th century, inflicted on ethnic Armenians by the fading Ottoman Empire in 1915.

It is also a story about the love and deep bond between a beloved grandfather and his granddaughter who had been entrusted to care for his diaries only upon his death. His shocking sudden death along with her inconsolable grief catapulted her into uncovering the true horrors of what he endured yet never spoke about. This discovery brought her to terms with her own unspoken ghosts that had always haunted her every move and even led her to a profession in Family Mental Health and becoming a Child Development Specialist.

The importance of this story to the author herself is underscored by the unusual approach she takes, addressing her main character directly as she attempts to understand the enormity of the terrible events he lived through, while she herself finally is able to stop the forces that shadowed her all her life by becoming able to lay down the dead she had never known she was carrying.