Aram Yardumian

Mountains on Fire Այրվող Սարեր is a noir thriller grounded in the historical facts of the Nagorno-Karabakh War (1988-1994). It is set in Nagorno-Karabakh itself as well as Yerevan, 1993-1994, as the war reaches its peak and dark times have descended. Two decorated war heroes, Gregory Yaloyan and Haik Nalbandyan, have been executed for high treason. The various accounts of their collusion with the enemy don’t add up to a journalist, who sets about reconstructing their final days by talking with dodgy characters who claim knowledge of the events. Yaloyan passed secret codes to the Azeris. Nalbandyan planted explosives in a children’s amusement park and shot up a church. But why? Or did the two soldiers become caught up in a conspiracy orchestrated by a mysterious man with a violin case? The future of the state of Armenia hangs in the balance.

 

 

“A spellbinding weave of intrigue, history, and culture Mountains on Fire brings the rich and complex world of Armenia to life, illuminating how it’s troubled past throws long shadows into the present. With a vision both unflinching and compassionate, Yardumian writes of the war-torn territories not only of Armenia, but also of the human heart—places prone to chronic hauntings. Yardumian is a formidable storyteller whose keen and magical imagination and narrative energy blends the surreal and fabulist worlds of Gabriel García Márquez and Anton Chekhov’s sharp bursts of astonishing insight.”

––Gina Oschner, author of The Necessary Grace to Fall, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award in 2001, and the The Russian Dream Book of Color and Flight

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"Aram Yardumian’s Mountains on Fire, about the Armenian Azerbaijani war of 1992–94 in Nagorno–Karabakh, is a thriller with a documentary foundation: the author was present in the places of the action and knows his subject well. Yardumian writes fiction with openness and honesty that is rare––intimate details of the war are many, and the novel balances on the verge of non–fiction. It’s a story of suspense that American readers will appreciate for the plot and come away with knowledge about these events still largely unknown in the US."

––Ilya Kutik, Poet, Associate Professor, Northwestern University

“Armed with poetic prose, Aram Yardumian’s debut explores how war and its aftermath lingers, lurks, and haunts. Rooted in the Armenian experience, Yardumian gracefully gestures to universal complexities: that the unresolved is our only certainty, that the question is the answer.”

––Raffi Joe Wartanian, inaugural poet laureate of Glendale, CA

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