It’s 1915. War rages in Europe while Armenians in the Ottoman Empire find themselves unfairly blamed for a major military defeat. Cooped up at home, fourteen-year-old Arakel tries to ignore rumors of arrests and beatings of Armenians by focusing on the journey with his two best friends, one Turkish and the other Armenian, on the Silk Road to China in two years, after high school, certain war will be over by then.
His life is torn apart when Turkish officials order nearly every Armenian into exile in the desert. Tormented by armed guards, Arakel doesn’t grasp what’s happening until they strip his family of food, water, and their meagre possessions and force them across the Euphrates River where bloated corpses float by. He has crossed into the land of the dead. In a desperate attempt to survive, he must reach out to people of different faiths and backgrounds–Bedouins, Kurds, Arab camel drivers, Turks, Germans, and even a wandering dervish, people he considers enemies, but can he trust them?
In a barbaric world, he confronts what lies deep within the human heart. With an elegance reaffirming our collective humanity, The Kaleidoscope of Destiny reveals the courage, hope, and ingenuity to survive the darkest of times during an overlooked part of history and will resonate in today’s challenges.
Before publishing her debut novel, The Kaleidoscope of Destiny, Sarah Ignatius worked for many years as a human rights lawyer and as a nonprofit executive director. She also taught immigration and asylum law at Boston College Law School for several years and is the co-author of Immigration Law and the Family. Previously, she authored a detailed report on the U.S. asylum system for Harvard Law School’s National Asylum Study Project, and her legal articles have appeared in the Harvard Human Rights Journal, Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, Benders Immigration Bulletin, and Immigration Briefings. She has received recognition from the New England Society of Children’s Books Writers & Illustrators and the National League of American Pen Women as well as Glimmer Train, and was selected as a Somerville Arts Council Literature Artist Fellow. She graduated from Stanford University and Georgetown University Law Center. She is half-Armenian and lives in Massachusetts with her family.
Ignatius will be joined in conversation with David Ignatius, a prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post and has been covering the Middle East and the CIA for four decades. He has written several New York Times bestsellers. He lives in Washington, DC.