Los Angeles — Skylight Books (1818 N. Vermont Ave.) welcomes Aline Ohanesian on Tuesday, April 7 at 7:30pm
In her extraordinary debut, Aline Ohanesian has created two remarkable characters–a young man ignorant of his family’s and his country’s past, and an old woman haunted by the toll the past has taken on her life.
When Orhan’s brilliant and eccentric grandfather Kemal–a man who built a dynasty out of making “kilim” rugs–is found dead, submerged in a vat of dye, Orhan inherits the decades-old business. But Kemal’s will raises more questions than it answers. He has left the family estate to a stranger thousands of miles away, an aging woman in an Armenian retirement home in Los Angeles. Her existence and secrecy about her past only deepen the mystery of why Orhan’s grandfather willed his home in Turkey to an unknown woman rather than to his own son or grandson. Left with only Kemal’s ancient sketchbook and intent on righting this injustice, Orhan boards a plane to Los Angeles. There he will not only unearth the story that eighty-seven-year-old Seda so closely guards but discover that Seda’s past now threatens to unravel his future. Her story, if told, has the power to undo the legacy upon which his family has been built. Moving back and forth in time, between the last years of the Ottoman Empire and the 1990s, Orhan’s Inheritance is a story of passionate love, unspeakable horrors, incredible resilience, and the hidden stories that can haunt a family for generations.
Aline Ohanesian’s great-grandmother was a survivor of the Armenian Genocide. Her history was the kernel for the story that Ohanesian tells in her first novel, Orhan’s Inheritance. Ohanesian was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction and “Glimmer Train”‘s Short Story Award for New Writers. Born in Northridge, California, she lives and writes in San Juan Capistrano, California, with her husband and two young sons. Her website is www.alineohanesian.com.
The event takes place on April 7 at 7:30pm.
Please visit link to the event:
http://www.skylightbooks.com/event/aline-ohanesian-reads-her-debut-novel-orhans-inheritance
Skylight Books is located at 1818 N. Vermont in Los Feliz (cross is Franklin), 323-660-1175. www.skylightbooks.com