A delightful fictional blend of history, suspense, and a love of wine.
A tale of murder and organized crime revolves around the blooming of the Armenian wine industry following the nation’s independence from Soviet rule.
Armenia boasts a rich tradition of winemaking that stretches back 6,000 years, but it was ingloriously interrupted by the depredations of Soviet despotism. In this novel, two close friends and wine aficionados—Haig Koleyan and Van Dorian—are committed to reviving the long dormant industry, a devotion expressed with defiant enthusiasm by Haig: “The Soviets turned everyone’s life upside down, but they couldn’t change geography. Neither Marx nor Lenin nor Stalin could take away our terroir!” Haig leaves Italy, where he made his mark as a winemaker, for Yerevan. He starts his own business, Vinoma Consulting, and becomes a prestigious producer of well-regarded wines. Dorian opens The Realm, the “most popular wine bar in the city,” a place where “he could develop his theories about wine and human emotions.” After being rudely visited by a Russian—a “nasty character” who demands inordinately large orders for a mysterious client—Haig suspects a conspiracy on the part of the Russian mob to fraudulently dilute and resell his finest wine. Zanoyan conjures an enchanting combination of the transcendently beautiful and barbarous. After Sergei Petyan, the associate of a successful but morally dubious Russian wine merchant, is murdered, and Isabelle Karayan, a former employee of Haig, is brutally beaten up, wine entrepreneur Aram Almayan, uses his police connections to investigate. The author’s ardor for wine is unmistakable and his knowledge impressively prodigious. In addition, he weaves discussions of wine into every crevice of human affairs—at one point, Dorian wonders what kind of wine would pair well with one’s “disillusionment with justice.” Further, Zanoyan paints a vivid tableau of Armenia in the wake of Soviet oppression, both the humiliation suffered under it and the exhilarating hope after. The novel will intoxicate readers with its rare mix of historical astuteness, literary skill, and well-crafted drama.
A delightful fictional blend of history, suspense, and a love of wine.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9983924-1-7
Page Count: 299
Publisher: Bowker Identifier Services
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.
A dramatic, complex imagining of the origins of Stonehenge.
In about 2500 B.C.E. on the Great Plain, Seft and his family collect flints in a mine. He dislikes the work, and the motherless lad hates the abuse he gets from his father and brothers. He leaves them and arrives at a wooden monument where sacred events such as the Midsummer Rite take place. There are also circles of stones that help predict equinoxes, solstices, even eclipses. This is a world where the customary greeting is “May the Sun God smile on you,” and everyone is a year older on Midsummer Day. Except for a priestess or two, no one can count beyond fingers and toes—to indicate 30, they show both hands, point to both feet, then show both hands again. Casual sex is common, and sex between women is less common but not taboo. Joia, a young woman who becomes a priestess, wonders about her sexuality. After a fire destroys the Monument, she leads a bold effort to rebuild it in stone. To please the gods, they must haul 10 giant stones from distant Stony Valley. Of course neither machinery nor roads exist, so the difficulties are extraordinary. Although the project has its detractors, hundreds of able-bodied people are willing to help. Craftspeople known as cleverhands construct a sled and a road, and they make the rope to wrap around the stones. Many, many others pull. And pull. Meanwhile, the three principal groups—farmers, woodlanders, and herders—all have their separate interests. There is talk of war, which Joia has never seen in her lifetime. Soon it seems inevitable that the powerful farmers will not only start one but win it, unless heroes like Seft and Joia can come up with a creative plan. But there is also the matter of love for Joia in this well-plotted and well-told yarn. The story has a lot of characters from multiple tribes, and they can be hard to keep track of. A page in the front of the book listing who’s who would be helpful.
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781538772775
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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