Aline Ohanesian's debut novel, Orhan's Inheritance, is a stunning exploration of how choosing to remember--and to forget--can shape an individual, a family and an entire people. The story opens on Kemal, an aging tailor found dead in a vat of cloth dye. His death is strange, but his will is even stranger: he has defied Turkish tradition and left his business to his grandson Orhan and his house to Seda, a stranger to the family living in an Armenian nursing home in Los Angeles.
Intending to recover his grandfather's house for his family, Orhan sets off to Los Angeles to convince Seda to renounce her claim to the decrepit, far away property--but also to understand who she is and how she knew his grandfather. What unfolds is a test of wills: Orhan's, to better understand his grandfather and family history, and Seda's, to suppress her memories of the past. In halting, hesitant fragments, Seda opens up, and what she tells Orhan--and what Kemal intended Orhan to learn--proves to have the potential to redefine Orhan's understanding of his family's history, and of his nation's past.
Ohanesian moves seamlessly between the present day and Seda's guarded recollections of her history, to relay an emotional and at times horrific story of the Armenian genocide a century ago. Seda's story--the story of a struggle and the suppression of an entire people--is full of pain and heartbreak, but Orhan's Inheritance proves the power of storytelling to reveal beauty and truth in the most unexpected of places. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm