The Book of Whispers

“The Book of Whispers is a collage, complex and of ever ampler proportions, the greatest merit of which lies not so much in the storytelling (although it does a splendid job at that) as in the pointing to the human abyss that lies beyond what the story tells.”—Costica Bradatan, Literary Review

“Poignant. . . . Vosganian’s ethereal prose is at its best when describing wartime atrocities. It becomes a detached voice—a hypnotic voice—when grisly details are not spared.”—Virginia Parobek, World Literature Today

Honorable Mention for the 2017 Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work, sponsored by the Modern Language Association

“An excellent novel of the Armenian tragedy, written in the Oriental tradition of storytelling, in a mythical historical landscape and the modern turbulence.”—Norman Manea, author of The Hooligan‘s Return

“We suffer from collective amnesia, we don’t learn from our past horrors. Fiction, perhaps, exists to guide us there where we have allowed our memory to fail. Through family recollections, public accounts and factual reports, Varujan Vosganian has built an extraordinary novel that is also a memory machine. After reading The Book of Whispers we can no longer deny this shameful chapter of our common past.”—Alberto Manguel, author of The Library at Night