The Armenian Friend — Andrei Makine

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 periphery of a prison where their husbands, sons, and fathers are detained. It is there, in the warmth of their home, that the narrator meets courage, love, and dignity -- all of which will mark him for the rest of his life.

At first, only Vardan's mysterious attacks of fever and pain, diagnosed simply as the “Armenian disease,” can separate the friends. But then an act of child's play is suspected by the regime as aiding in an escape attempt from one of the nearby camps.

My Armenian Friend powerfully conjures a double nostalgia: that of an isolated Armenian community for their native country, and that of a boy for his childhood friend.