A beautifully-told tale about another dark, lesser well-known time in human history -- the Armenian diaspora in the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) during World War I. Through rich characters, Aline Ohanesian brings to life a harrowing tale of love, family, sacrifice, shame, forgetting and remembering, unspeakable brutality, and redemption. This new author is someone to watch. ( )

Kemal, who founded a successful family rug making business leaves behind a confusing will. He skips over his son and leaves the business to his grandson Orhan and his house to a woman no one in the family has heard of. Stranger still is that the woman lives in Los Angeles where to their knowledge Kemal had never been.

It's important to Orhan that the home go to his father. He decides the only way to get to the bottom of the mystery is to go to Los Angeles and find out who this woman is. When he finds her, she's reluctant to talk until several days have passed. Although she had known Kemal as a child, it's when they were young adults that the story begins. It takes place at the beginning of WWI during the Christian Armenian genocide and her story will have a more devastating effect on Orhan's family than he could ever have imagined.

I appreciate that the book places a focus on a part of history that I was only vaguely aware of. It isn't a book I expect to reread, but I'm glad to have read it once. ( )

FROM AMAZON: When Orhan's brilliant and eccentric grandfather - a man who built a dynasty out of making kilim rugs - is found dead, submerged in a vat of dye, Orhan inherits the decades-old business. But his grandfather's will raises more questions than answers.

Kemal has left the family estate to a stranger, thousands of miles away, an aging woman in an Armenian retirement home in Los Angeles. Her existence and secrecy about her past only deepen the mystery of why Orhan's grandfather would have willed their home in Turkey to an unknown woman rather than to his own son or grandson.

Left with only Kemal's ancient sketchbook and intent on righting this injustice, Orhan boards a plane to Los Angeles. There, over many meetings, he will not only unearth the story that 87-year-old Seda so closely guards but discover that Seda's past now threatens to unravel his future. It's a story that, if told, has the power to undo the legacy upon which his family is built.

Moving back and forth in time, between the last years of the Ottoman Empire and the 1990s, Orhan's Inheritance is a story of passionate love, unspeakable horrors, incredible resilience, and the hidden stories that haunt a family.

Divided timeline 1990/1915 about Armenian genocide. Woman loses her entire family on forced March from home in Anantolia with the Turks accusing them of turning against the Turks in WWI. Interesting realistic story, but doesn’t follow thru on deep thoughts. Made me want to know more, though about that country’s involvement in the war. ( )

I liked this one but didn't love it. If I had ever heard about the Armenian genocide that began in 1915, I had sure forgotten it, so I was glad to read a book dramatizing that nasty bit of history. I found nothing really objectionable about the writing in this book -- it went down easily and was pleasant enough to read -- but it also didn't knock my socks off. At times I suppose the pace seemed a little sluggish, which is weird in what turns out to be a pretty short book (it's shorter than the page count suggests). I'm glad I read it but was not so captivated that I'm likely to read it again or go out of my way to watch for more by this author. ( )