Odinochka: Armenian Tales from the Gulag

Vartan Manukyan is a 29 year old prisoner in a Soviet Gulag in Siberia, who has just been given a death sentence; three nights in solitary confinement in a cold cell. Odinochka delves into the mind of this single, forgotten prisoner, and unveils the story of a man haunted by memories of his youth, growing up in an orphanage in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. Caught in a siege in the city of Van, he and his friends are left with no choice but to participate in its defense. The novel follows his attempt to make sense of the world around him in the harshness of the orphanage and the turmoil of the war, and find an emotional escape through the stories he tells and the friends he makes. Odinochka is a story for those who did and did not survive, for those who are only remembered as statistics; a single number in the death toll. This book gives a unique perspective on the Armenian Genocide and Stalin’s Great Purge, intertwined with folk tales and insights into what it’s like to be a child during war.