Passage to Ararat

In Passage to Ararat which received the National Book Award in 1976 Michael J. Arlen goes beyond the portrait of his father the famous Anglo-Armenian novelist of the 1920s that he created in Exiles to try to discover what his father had tried to forget: Armenia and what it meant to be an Armenian a descendant of a proud people whom conquerors had for centuries tried to exterminate. But perhaps most affectingly Arlen tells a story as large as a whole people yet as personal as the uneasy bond between a father and a son offering a masterful account of the affirmation and pain of kinship.