Set to come up in March of 2008 in English translation by Maureen Freely and introduced by Elif Shafak, here is an excerpt from “My Grandmother,” a story of a Turkish lawyer who found out at an adult age that her grandmother was a hidden Armenian and a survivor of the Genocide. 

This excerpt is by another translator, Ayşe Agiş:

Whenever I remember the January of that year I get the shivers; I feel the cold in my deepest core, an ache takes hold of me. When she wanted to describe great suffering, my mother used to put her hand on her left breast and say, “Here, right here, there is a place which is one continuous ache.” So, I too, feel a gnawing, continuous ache in the depths of my heart.
       The freezing courtyard of the mosque is surrounded by a wall of huge, dark old stones. In the middle is the big “musalla” stone, so cold that just to look at it makes me shiver; and on it is a coffin. The “musalla” and its supporting base are both made of enormous blocks of stone. The stone under the coffin is so cold that I fear my hand would get stuck if I touched it. I keep away. It is as if all this, the giant walls, the stones, have all been designed to make the human being feel helpless, abject.
       Ever since, whenever I see a musalla stone, I feel cold whatever the season, and I hurry past. Sometimes, just out of the blue, that mosque courtyard, that musalla stone and that cold come to my mind. And I feel frozen all over again.
       Emrah called that night. “We’ve lost our grandmother,” he said.
       I know she is dead. This morning, at the cemetery, in the “gusulhane” (the very word makes me shiver), the women washed her, prepared her; then invited us in for the ceremonial farewell. I bade farewell to her cold body, kissed her cheeks. On my lips I still feel that chill which does not at all suit that skin so familiar to me. I know that she has been placed in this coffin, but I still cannot accept it. It all seems as if it is happening in a dream. I cannot believe that my grandmother would be lying so still and so helpless in that coffin. And also, that we, her family can be looking on in such helplessness.
       We, the women, stand waiting in the most isolated corner of the courtyard. As we stood there, embracing and weeping with the newcomers, a man from among the male throng came over in a flurry and asked:
       “What are the names of Aunt Seher’s mother and father?”
       There was no immediate answer to this question from the group of women. We each gazed at the others. Our silence went on for a noticeably long time. Then finally, the silence was broken by one of the women, my aunt Zehra:
       “Her father’s name is Huseyin, her mother’s Esma.”
       As soon as she uttered these names, my aunt turned her eyes to me as if asking for affirmation, or so it seemed to me.
       Just as the man turned away, relieved finally to have extracted an answer from this strangely reticent crowd of women, the following words tore themselves from my heart and broke out of my mouth:
       “But that’s not true!… Her mother’s name is not Esma, it is Isquhi. And her father is not Huseyin, but Hovannes!”