Donald Rayfield

Ghosts of Anatolia

‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else’: A History of the Armenian Genocide

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Princeton University Press 490pp £24.95 order from our bookshop

Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide

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Oxford University Press 298pp £20 order from our bookshop

Fragments of a Lost Homeland: Remembering Armenia

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I B Tauris 342pp £22.50 order from our bookshop

The extent of the Armenian genocide (at a sober estimate, half of the 1.5 million Armenians of Constantinople and Anatolia were slaughtered) carried out by Turks in 1915 was dwarfed by the Holocaust inflicted by the Nazis and their allies between 1941 and 1945, but the horror of the events and the festering political consequences are just as great. Yet recognition of the Armenian genocide is less widespread and more often denied than the extermination of Europe’s Jews. The literature alone is sparse and mostly academic: to date the most moving account is Franz Werfel’s fictional The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. However, the centenary of the genocide is being marked by three fine and very different studies. It is to be hoped that they will be published not only in English but in Turkish (Azeri and Ottoman) and Armenian too.

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