Between the Stillness and the Grove

While I don’t come across many stories about Winnipeg, Between the Stillness and the Grove by Erika de Vasconcelos (Knopf) may be the first one I’ve read about Armenia. In this book the stories of two Armenian women are interwoven to create a deep and moving picture of the lives of displaced people. Vecihe is the daughter of a woman who survived the death marches when Armenians were kicked out of one country after another. Dzovig, the lover of Vecihe’s son, flees Armenia and finds herself in Portugal, where she struggles to make a life. The story moves back and forth between past and present and from country to country as each woman remembers the events that brought them together and then separated them. While Dzovig searches for herself, Vecihe searches for Dzovig, and both quests kept me reading and rereading.