ANYUSH

An international novel of love and endurances, set against the backdrop of the Armenian Turkish conflict of 1915 and the Great War.

Anyush Charcoudian is a young Armenian woman living with her widowed mother and grandmother on the Black Sea coast of Turkey in 1915 - educated by American missionaries, she is working at the missionary hospital. Known in the village as an oddity, she discovers in her dealings with the Americans a perspective alien to the culture and traditions of the Armenian community. But her hopes of becoming a teacher or nurse in her own right are cast aside when she falls in love with the handsome Turkish Captain Jahan Orfalea. Her actions will have consequences not only for herself but for their child. Jahan Orfalea is a Captain in the Turkish army, only son of wealthy bourgeois parents, who has been drafted to Trebizond to guard against a Russian invasion along the Black Sea. Deciding to seduce the young Armenian for a bet, he falls in love with Anyush and they have an affair. Witnessing a cruel attack on an Armenian girl, his complaint to army headquarters backfires and he is put in charge of forcibly marching the Trebizond Armenians across dangerous territory. In the line of marchers dying of starvation, cholera and exposure is his lover Anyush and the daughter he knows nothing about. Dr. Charles Stewart is a missionary doctor. He and his wife Hetty happily raise their family in the small Armenian village until word from Constantinople warns of disturbing moves against Armenians. His colleague Dr. Paul Trowbridge tries to alert him to similar assaults closer to home, but the American dismisses the rumours as war mongering gossip. Accepting too late the reality of the situation, Charles makes one last desperate attempt to save the villagers. A novel about the unlikely alliances forged in desperate times and the ensuing consequences, at its heart it is a story about love. Martine Madden was born in Limerick and qualified as a radiographer after leaving school. She worked in Dublin and later moved to the United Arab Emirates with her husband John. The stories recounted to her by the Armenian diaspora there prompted her interest in Armenian history and formed the basis of the novel Anyush. Martine returned to Ireland in 1990 and now lives in the Midlands with her husband and five children.