This novel of survival against all odds chronicles one family's struggle during the Armenian genocide in Turkey in 1915.

At the age of thirteen, Yerwant left his home in the Anatolian hills of Turkey to study at an Armenian boarding school in Venice. Now, forty years later, he is planning a long-awaited reunion with his relatives at their family home, Skylark Farm. But while joyful preparations for Yerwant's arrival are being made in the town of his birth, Italy is closing its borders as it enters the Great War...

Two years later, as war continues across Europe, and attacks on Turkey's Armenian community become increasingly murderous, Yerwant's family begins a brutal odyssey of hunger and humiliation.
Fighting brutality with love, courage and hope, four of the family's children set out on a dangerous and daring course of their own: to reach Yerwant, and safety, in Italy.

Translated by: Geoffrey Brock