Family of Shadows, Garin K. Hovannisian (hardcover)

Garin K. Hovannisian’s Family of Shadows is a searing history of Armenia, realized through the lives of three generations of a single family. In Family of Shadows, Hovannisian traces the arc of his family’s changing relationship to its motherland, from his great-grandfather’s flight to America after surviving the Armenian Genocide to his grandfather Richard Hovannisian’s groundbreaking scholarship of the first Republic of Armenia to his father Raffi Hovannisian’s repatriation and subsequent climb to political prominence. “It is, among other things, a case study in the circularity of family history. While determined to differentiate themselves from the preceding generation, the men of the Hovannisian family are invariably driven by the need to address and avenge the past wrongs visited upon the Armenians, Richard as a historian, Raffi as a politician, and now Garin as their chronicler. Embedded in all of their work, despite the tragedies of the past, there is inevitably idealism about the future. The story of Armenia isn’t over; perhaps the next century can be better than the last” (Andrew Martin, The New York Review of Books).