Overview

The Seamstress of Ourfa richly recreates the culture of the Armenian community in Ourfa at the tail end of the Ottoman Empire. The eponymous seamstress, Khatoun, creates beautiful dresses that leave her customers' husbands dizzy with desire, while her sister in law Ferida cooks sumptuous feasts to sustain a growing and lovingly described group of relatives and the waifs and strays they adopt. The author creates a finely textured sense of family, only slowly making the reader aware that the date is creeping nearer to 1915 and the genocide of the Armenian people in Turkey. When the horrendous events of those years start to unfold, the traditions and lives of the Armenian people are slowly yet inexorably torn apart. The Seamstress of Ourfa does not shy away from the painful realities of those years, but manages to maintain a sense of cultural continuity into the 1960's, where the author's surviving family reunite in Nicosia, Cyprus.

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9789963255597

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An intimate and richly lyrical epic of Armenian life and tragedy. Colin Thubron ...the real undertaking of this tender novel is a journey across the hills and valleys of the human heart. Butler-Sloss delivers her readers into the careful, nurturing hands of her female characters who sew, cook, and nurse the broken hearts and minds inhabiting this moving novel. Aline Ohanesian Vividly imagined and down to the last stitch of a coat hem in the most gorgeous prose, this is a story of a love upon which generations would one day be built... A work borne of a passion that resonates on every page... Aminatta Forna You cannot help but fall under the spell this novel weaves. You forget that it is writing... you are simply transported to the rooms and courtyards, the mountain roads and town streets, and from these into the hopes and fears, and complex nature, of the depicted. Mark Mayes

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