Winner of the PEN/Albrand Award A New York Times Notable Book From a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a memoir of family secrets, survival, and growing up in the shadow of the Armenian genocide "A fascinating and affecting memoir....Written with great sensitivity, Black Dog of Fate is at once a family memoir, a history of the extermination of the Armenians in Turkey, and the story of a young man's passage into adulthood."--New York Times Book Review In this prizewinning classic memoir, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and New York Times bestselling author Peter Balakian explores his suburban childhood and charts his slow uncovering of the truth of what happened to his family during the Armenian Genocide. In describing his awakening to the facts of history, Balakian introduces us to a remarkable family of matriarchs and merchants, physicians, a bishop, and his aunts, two well-known figures in the world of literature. The unforgettable central figure of the story is Balakian's grandmother, a survivor and widow of the Genocide who speaks in fragments of metaphor and myth as she cooks up Armenian delicacies, plays the stock market, and keeps track of the baseball stats of her beloved Yankees. Balakian moves with ease from childhood memory to history, to his ancestors' lives, to the story of his own coming of age. Written with power and grace, Black Dog of Fate is a tale of survival against enormous odds.

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