“The Repatriate Returns”: Tom Mooradian’s posthumous sequel explores home, family and the FBI

Nearly two decades after the publication of The Repatriate: Love, Basketball, and the KGB, the award-winning memoir of Detroit-born basketball player and journalist Tom Mooradian, readers can now experience the long-awaited sequel. The Repatriate Returns: Home, Family, and the FBI continues Mooradian’s remarkable story of identity, resilience and reconciliation — a narrative entrusted to his loved ones before his passing on June 5, 2024.

In the late 1940s, Mooradian left behind a promising basketball career in the United States to travel to Soviet Armenia with a group of repatriates, where he lived through political repression, cultural transformation and the enduring hope of returning to his homeland. His memoir, The Repatriate, first published in 2008, won seven book awards: the Hollywood Book Festival, Reader’s Views Literary Awards, San Francisco Book Festival, Royal Dragonfly Book Awards, Kindle Book Awards, the Indie Book Awards and the Eric Hoffer Book Awards. It has since become an essential contribution to Armenian diaspora literature, praised for its honesty, humanity and historical insight.