A heart-wrenching novel that is at once an indelible portrait of friendship, a coming-of-age tale, and a dive into the memory of the Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman Empire. Siberia, early seventies. The narrator, a thirteen-year-old orphan, saves Vardan, a young Armenian boy, from discrimination and being attacked by fellow Soviet students in their schoolyard. A friendship is born. When Vardan brings him home, the narrator enters a world of Armenian families living in the pe