The Burning Heart of the World

· February 21, 2025

This is an arrestingly beautiful novel set amidst the backdrop of displacement and war, illuminating how we carry history deep into even the most forgotten corners of ourselves. Once you start reading about Vera and her family, you won’t be able to put this book down,” said Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of The Evening Hero

The publication of this book coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Lebanese Civil War and the one

hundred and tenth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Nancy Kricorian whose grandparents were genocide survivors, delivers The Burning Heart of the World (Red Hen Press; April 1, 2025), a vivid, poetic, heartbreaking novel filled with rich

historical knowledge and cultural insights that inform her characters making them jump off the page and into our hearts and minds.

Literary as well as fast-moving, oscillating between intimate moments and loud flashes of the chaos of war, with glints of humor shining through like silver linings, this story of a Beirut Armenian family before, during, and after the war is imbued

with the timelessness of a folktale.

Returning to the fabular tone of Zabelle, her popular first novel, Kricorian conjures up the lost worlds and intergenerational traumas that haunt a family in permanent exile. The Burning Heart of the World is a sweeping saga that takes readers on an

epic journey from the mountains of Cilicia to contemporary New York City.

“Like colorful miniatures—from a childhood of elders haunted by the Armenian genocide, to girlhood and adolescence amidst war in Beirut, to marriage and children in New York at the time of 9/11—Nancy Kricorian finds just the right scale to bring her heroine’s passage to vivid, reverberating life” said Aram Saroyan, author of Still Night in L.A.

Nancy Kricorian, who was born and raised in the Armenian community of Watertown, Massachusetts, is the author of four novels about post-

genocide Armenian diaspora experience, including Zabelle, which was translated into seven languages, was adapted as a play, and has been

continuously in print since 1998. Her essays and poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Guernica, Parnassus, Minnesota Review, The Mississippi Review, and other journals.

She has taught at Barnard, Columbia, Yale, and New York University, as well as for Teacher & Writers Collaborative in the New York City

Public Schools and for the Palestine Writing Workshop in Birzeit. She has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Gold Medal from the Writers Union of Armenia, and the Anahid Literary Award. She lives in New York City.