What is Nancy Kricorian reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Nancy Kricorian, author of All the Light There Was.

Her entry begins:

I discovered the work of Russian writer Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) a few years ago through his masterpiece, the World War II novel Life and Fate. At the time, I had steeped myself in the literature of World War II because of work on my own novel, All the Light There Was, which is set in Paris during the Nazi Occupation, and Grossman’s book was a stunning surprise. Just a few weeks ago I picked up the newly published An Armenian Sketchbook by Grossman. It is a memoir of the two months he spent in Soviet Armenia in late 1961, soon after Life and Fate was suppressed by the authorities because of its unflinching portrayal of life in Stalinist Russia. Rather than imprisoning the author, they buried his book. Life and Fate, which existed as a long-hidden typescript that Grossman had left with a friend, was finally published in the late 80’s, but...[read on]

About All the Light There Was, from the publisher:

All the Light There Was is the story of an Armenian family’s struggle to survive the Nazi occupation of Paris in the 1940s—a lyrical, finely wrought tale of loyalty, love, and the many faces of resistance.

On the day the Nazis march down the rue de Belleville, fourteen-year-old Maral Pegorian is living with her family in Paris; like many other Armenians who survived the genocide in their homeland, they have come to Paris to build a new life. The adults immediately set about gathering food and provisions, bracing for the deprivation they know all too well. But the children—Maral, her brother Missak, and their close friend Zaven—are spurred to action of another sort, finding secret and not-so-secret ways to resist their oppressors. Only when Zaven flees with his brother Barkev to avoid conscription does Maral realize that the Occupation is not simply a temporary outrage to be endured. After many fraught months, just one brother returns, changing the contours of Maral’s world completely.

Like Tatiana de Rosnay’s Sarah’s Key and Jenna Blum’s Those Who Save Us, All the Light There Was is an unforgettable portrait of lives caught in the crosswinds of history.

Learn more about the book and author at Nancy Kricorian's website.

The Page 69 Test: All the Light There Was.

Writers Read: Nancy Kricorian.

--Marshal Zeringue