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Bone Ash Sky

Books & Poetry

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Bone Ash Sky is an incredible novel from a unique talent, for fans of quality literature. Katerina Cosgrove’s prose is sinuous, pictorial and terrifically controlled. Yet her tale of a multigenerational examination of an ill-fated family is potent, unsettling, politically motivated, vociferous and superbly crafted.

The author controls her readers for the emotional revelations, giving them truths about genocide, and man’s inhumanity to man, with a narrative flair that supplely regulates the conflicted and complex picture of the disorder in the Middle East.

Anoush Pakradounian is an American journalist of Armenian descent. She arrives in Beirut searching for answers but isn’t prepared for the horrors she discovers. Her father was a member of the Christian phalangist militia in Lebanon. Worse still, he was a murderer who in bloody retribution was tortured and executed by Muslims. Yet this isn’t the paramount momentous occurrence concerning her family’s misfortune. That happened in 1915, during the first genocide of the twentieth century, when her ancestors were slaughtered, and over a million other Armenians living in Turkey were eliminated from their historic homeland through forced deportations and massacres.

As the story unfurls the reader sees atrocities through Anoush’s and her family’s eyes and is intrigued by their compassion towards people on all sides of religious and sectarian conflict. Even though the characters are obsessed with the past, they understand that everyone, especially the perpetrators, are all victims of the present that will affect the future.

Cogrove’s work seems to have more authority and authenticity because she writes so passionately yet serenely, calm, and composed, about the fractured region and its damaged peoples.

Bone Ash Sky is a magnificent book.

BONE ASH SKY by Katerina Cosgrove was published by Hardie Grant, $29.95

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