May Book Club: Ramallah Chapter (English)

We have been hosting Book Club chapters for two years now and are pleased to continue sharing English books. If you are interested in our Arabic chapter, check out the announcement for upcoming meetings. 

Reading can be a wonderful experience but being able to share with others your excitement or disappointment can make it that much better!  If you would like to join a chapter, email us and pick up a reading kit. There is no cost (except for a returnable deposit for borrowed books).

Nancy Kricorian's Zabelle

Discussion Date: Saturday, June 8, 2013 (The May Book Club will be postponed to June 8 due to the Palestine Festival of Literature, which is the last week in May)

Time: 3:30 - 4:30 pm

Location: Cafe La Vie, Ramallah

About the Author: Nancy Kricorian is the author of novels ZABELLE and DREAMS OF BREAD AND FIRE, both published by Grove/Atlantic, and ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS, published in March 2013 by Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt. Kricorian grew up in the Armenian community of Watertown, Massachusetts, and earned her undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College ; she spent the following year studying semiotics at the University of Paris-Jussieu. After completing a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at Columbia University, Kricorian thought at Yale, Rutgers, Barnard, and Queens Colleges. She subsequently worked for ten years as a literary scout for foreign publishers, and since 2003 has been on the staff of CODEPINK Women for Peace. She lives in New York City with her family.

About the Book: ZABELLE begins in a suburb of Boston with the quiet death of Zabelle Chahasbanian, an elderly widow and grandmother whose history remains vastly unknown to her family. But as the story shifts back in time to Zabelle's childhood in the waning of Ottoman Turkey, where she survives the Armenian genocide and near starvation in the Syrian desert, an unforgettable character begins emerge. Zabelle's journey encompasses in an Istanbul orphanage, a foruitous adoption by a rich Armenian family, and an arranged marriage to an Armenian grocer who brings her to America where the often comic interactions and battles she wages are forever colored by shadows from the long-lost world of her past.

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