Narine Yurievna Abgaryan

Three Apples Fell from the Sky is set in a small mountaintop Armenian village at an indeterminate period in time—isolated as Maran is, the distant war mentioned could be any one of a number of 20th-century conflicts. Narine Abgaryan tells a series of interlocking, multi-generational and magical realism-tinged stories about the inhabitants of Maran which slide back and forth in time. There are some lovely passages, and I did wonder if there were layers of meaning here that I just wasn't picking up on because I don't have enough knowledge of the social/historical/political contexts and tensions. (Abgaryan is an Armenian living and working in Putin's Russia.) But for me, despite all of the tragedies recounted here, this book was a bit too sentimental. Maybe it doesn't ever quite become what you could technically class as twee, but the ending, in which a 58-year-old woman's (first?) epic bout of menstruation leads her to conceive and have a child for the first time, with her 70-something husband, all of whose children by his first marriage had died, toed up to the line for me.… (more)

This was so very wonderful. I sought it out because of a Read Across Asia challenge (the author, Abgaryan, is Armenian), and listen, the "balm for the soul" claim on the front cover was not an oversell.

At first this felt like a collection of connected short stories, but the chapters and various characters wove closer and closer together until it was all clearly a single piece. The story of Anatolia, but really of all of the village of Maran, which after earthquake, locusts, famine, and war, is home to only a few dozen old people. But this isn't a tragic tale of disappearing ways of life, but rather an affirming one of second chances, the ties of relationship and remembrance, the mutual care and aid that makes a community.

Really beautiful.… (more)