All the Light There Was
A Novel
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4.3 • 25 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“Love blooms just as war tears two people apart” in this novel about an Armenian refugee family in Nazi-occupied Paris (The New York Times).
All the Light There Was is the story of an Armenian family’s struggle to survive the Nazi occupation of Paris in the 1940s—a lyrical, finely wrought tale of loyalty, love, and the many faces of resistance.
On the day the Nazis march down the rue de Belleville, fourteen-year-old Maral Pegorian is living with her family in Paris; like many other Armenians who survived the genocide in their homeland, they have come to Paris to build a new life. The adults immediately set about gathering food and provisions, bracing for the deprivation they know all too well. But the children—Maral, her brother Missak, and their close friend Zaven—are spurred to action of another sort, finding secret and not-so-secret ways to resist their oppressors. Only when Zaven flees with his brother Barkev to avoid conscription does Maral realize that the Occupation is not simply a temporary outrage to be endured. After many fraught months, just one brother returns, changing the contours of Maral’s world completely.
Like Tatiana de Rosnay’s Sarah’s Key and Jenna Blum’s Those Who Save Us, All the Light There Was is an unforgettable portrait of lives caught in the crosswinds of history.
“Moving . . . With a bittersweet love story, examples of everyday heroism, and a community refusing to give in to tyrants, Kricorian’s work sheds even more light on the German occupation of France.” —Library Journal
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Maral Pegorian, a young Armenian girl in Paris during WWII, watches cautiously through shuttered windows as the Germans march down the avenues below. Instead of leaving, the Pegorians have decided to quietly ride out the occupation. Food is scarce and rations closely guarded, but a beam of hope drives Maral through the hardship and hunger: her infatuation with fellow Armenian Zaven, who, with Maral's older brother, Missak, joins the Resistance and brings the Pegorians' precarious freedom to the edge of disaster. To avoid conscription into the German work program, Zaven decides to follow his older brother, Barkev, underground, which leaves Maral to anxiously await his return. But Barkev returns alone; Zaven, who died in the work camps, made Barkev vow to look after Maral, who now finds her loyalties tested. Kricorian's depiction of a small community's experience of war is solid and touching. Readers are instantly drawn into this world, full of hardships of wartime occupation and references to the Armenian genocide of the previous generation. Thanks to multifaceted characters, Kricorian's treatment of family dynamics and love under extreme circumstances creates an emotional read.
