The Sandcastle Girls

 Chris Bohjalian is the author of The Sandcastle Girls, a family novel about the Armenian genocide. The story starts in Aleppo, Syria, in the 1915. A young woman recently graduated from college, comes to Aleppo with her father to help the victims from Armenia. She volunteers at the hospital. She brings an Armenian woman and child to live in her house with the embassy assistant. Her name is Elizabeth Endicott and she is with a Boston based organization called Friends Of Armenia. She brings food and medical supplies. There she meets an Armenian engineer named Armen. They fall in love and continue to write letters as he joins the British army to fight in Egypt. One hundred years later, one of their granddaughters finds a picture of them on display in Boston about the Armenian genocide. She writes their story using correspondence to and from them at the Friends Of Armenia center. I don't believe I ever learned about the Armenian genocide in any history lessons I attended. In some places it is forbidden to mention it. I preferred the parts of the book that took place in Aleppo over the parts that took place in Boston and New York.