In vivid, poetic prose, Nancy Kricorian’s The Burning Heart of the World tells the story of a Beirut Armenian family before, during and after the Lebanese Civil War.
Returning to the fabular tone of Zabelle, her popular first novel, Kricorian conjures up the lost worlds and intergenerational traumas that haunt a family in permanent exile. Leavened with humor and imbued with the timelessness of a folktale, The Burning Heart of the World is a sweeping saga that takes readers on an epic journey from the mountains of Cilicia to contemporary New York City.
“Like colorful miniatures — from a childhood of elders haunted by the Armenian genocide, to girlhood and adolescence amidst war in Beirut, to marriage and children in New York at the time of 9/11 — Nancy Kricorian finds just the right scale to bring her heroine’s passage to vivid, reverberating life.” — Aram Saroyan
“An arrestingly beautiful novel of how families draw us together, but also push us apart. Set amidst the backdrop of displacement and war, The Burning Heart of the World illuminates how we carry history deep into even the most forgotten corners of ourselves. Once you start reading about Vera and her family you won’t be able to put this book down.” — Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of The Evening Hero
Nancy Kricorian, who was born and raised in the Armenian community of Watertown, Massachusetts, is the author of four novels about post-genocide Armenian diaspora experience, including Zabelle, which was translated into seven languages, was adapted as a play and has been continuously in print since 1998. Her essays and poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Guernica, Parnassus, Minnesota Review, The Mississippi Review and other journals. She has taught at Barnard, Columbia, Yale and New York University, as well as Teacher & Writers Collaborative in the New York City Public Schools and for the Palestine Writing Workshop in Birzeit. She has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Gold Medal from the Writers Union of Armenia and the Anahid Literary Award. She lives in New York City. Sign up for the author’s newsletter here.
The novel is set to release on April 1, 2025, by Red Hen Press. Pre-order it here.
Latest posts by International Armenian Literary Alliance (see all)
- IALA announces its 2024 holiday book guide - November 20, 2024
- IALA to host a virtual panel on “The Business of Writing” - November 12, 2024
- “The Burning Heart of the World” by Nancy Kricorian - October 29, 2024
Be the first to comment