Love and exile lock horns in Nancy Kricorian’s Beirut war novel
The Burning Heart of the World
By Nancy Kricorian
Red Hen Press (April 1, 2025)
216 pages, $17.95
What does it take to leave behind home and community when war ravages your city? What does it take to stay? Would leaving make you a deserter, a coward or a traitor? What, if anything, do you owe your people? These questions have followed Armenians across time and borders—fleeing wars, rebuilding communities and carrying the trauma of genocide. In Nancy Kricorian’s new novel, The Burning Heart of the World, a Lebanese-Armenian family wrestles with these dilemmas as Beirut plunges into civil war. At the novel’s center is 12-year-old Vera—observant, sensitive and standing at the threshold of adolescence.
The novel opens with a family excursion to Mount Lebanon, where Vera witnesses a bloody bird hunt. The next scene jumps to the immediate aftermath of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks in New York. Vera—now an adult and a mother of twins—is overwhelmed by memories of war. New York has become “Beirut on the Hudson.” While her acquaintances attempt to process the senselessness of the crime, for Vera and her mother, what matters is action. Hoarding batteries is important. This opening sets the novel’s tone: violence is a constant, its absence fleeting and action—no matter how small—is a path through.
Most of the novel unfolds over a school year in Beirut. Vera, a student at an Armenian Evangelical school, is 12—an age of nascent desires, secrets and shame. Kricorian’s research and deep appreciation for the city, the school and the mindset of a schoolgirl are exceptional. As the city descends into chaos, Vera’s school remains open intermittently, offering an illusion of normalcy. We are drawn into a coming-of-age story where friendships and first loves are as central as the war outside. The youthful impulse to love—even in the face of danger—serves as an antidote to carnage. Vera doesn’t just seek to experience love; she seeks to witness it in others. Rooting for love, after all, is an act of resistance and hope.
The Burning Heart of the World is also a family novel. Vera lives with her parents, brother and grandmother, each experiencing war through a different lens. This allows Kricorian to explore themes of innocence, manhood, loyalty and belonging. But exile is the novel’s true setting. Vera’s grandmother, a genocide survivor, voices this: “Exile is a burning shirt.” This metaphor calls to mind the works of Istanbul-Armenian Zabel Yessayan (1934), French-Armenian Garo Poladian (1966) and Soviet-Armenian Vardges Petrosyan (1986), who each published a novel titled Shirt of Fire (Կրակէ Շապիկ[ը]). To be forced to contend—with history, identity, circumstance and displacement—is the affliction of the burning vestment, a cornerstone of Armenian existence. It is the inescapable discomfort, otherness and even alienation from oneself.
So, what do you do? Perhaps the same thing one does when violence impinges on calm: preoccupy oneself with life. “Stay busy, keep moving,” Vera’s mother advises.
One of the novel’s greatest strengths is its juxtaposition of the mundane with the catastrophic. Body parts fall from the sky. Checkpoints pop up. Snipers pick off civilians. Vera’s eccentric aunt wraps and unwraps glassware—a gesture that marks the brief interludes of ceasefires. Kricorian did this masterfully in All the Light There Was, her novel about an Armenian girl in Nazi-occupied France, restoring her characters’ agency by highlighting the small, domestic actions within their control. The draw of the mundane highlights the human instinct and insistence on normalcy even in times of catastrophe. It is a weather report promising a sunny day alongside an image of a bloodied firefighter at Ground Zero. This attempt to preserve the familiar can verge on absurdity. Sheltering in a corridor from shelling, Vera’s aunt quips, “Isn’t this fun? It’s like a picnic.” Dark humor and the refusal to succumb to despair are skills honed by a people marked by collective trauma.
The novel’s form takes the shape of trauma, with its silences and gaps. Kricorian is a careful writer; she does not sensationalize suffering. When a boy is shot, he does not bleed out on the pavement. Instead, “a bright red flower bloom[s] in the center of his white shirt.” Yet, trauma lingers. What the child Vera barely registers—the corpse of an old olive merchant—emerges in vivid detail in her adult recollection. In Kricorian’s telling, trauma is as much in the omissions as in the words. It is an imperceptible gap in the story. It is the absence of a boy’s reaction to death.
In writing about war, Kricorian gives power to life. This is a moral choice. But she is not a preacher, nor a political commentator. She spares us the banalities of faction wars and dizzying politics. We are aware of the political backdrop, but we are not mired in it. She does not legitimize violence—any violence. Instead, she mines wartime stakes for what is essential to human survival and faith.
The novel’s ending is where Kricorian’s brilliance shines. Like her debut, Zabelle, this story too concludes in Hadjin, a place where people, we are told, once believed in magic. And so, we surrender to its fabled beauty, letting Kricorian’s storytelling dazzle while extracting meaning from the depths of trauma—so that we, too, may carry on.
Nanore Barsoumian
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Nanore, thank you so much for this beautifully written and thoughtful review (without any SPOILERS!).
This looks like a fascinating book. I look forward to reading it.