Returning to Zaatar

Or how a book you thought you had finished quietly waits for you to grow older

Letters From Zaatar is available now. Cover art by Chris Bedian.

I know some of you have been waiting for this for a long time, and I’m sorry for the delay, but it’s finally done. My novel Letters from Zaatar is now available in English, both as a paperback and on Kindle on Amazon.

It’s a strange and quietly joyful feeling to see a book return like this, in a new language, and find its way to new readers.

Letters from Zaatar was first published in Los Angeles in 1996, in Armenian. It quickly became one of the widely read Armenian novels in the Diaspora and went through three printings. It was published in French, Turkish and this is its first appearance in English.

I’m not entirely sure translating one’s own work is ever a good idea. I’ve always felt that a translator approaches the text with more reverence than the author does. And yet I chose to do it myself. Rereading the book after so many years, I realized it needed small adjustments here and there, and I couldn’t bring myself to entrust those adjustments to anyone else.

Every translation is a small negotiation between accuracy and grace. I’ve done my best to remain faithful, but I hope the reader will forgive the occasional adjustment, made in the interest of keeping the prose alive, or at least presentable.

What surprised me most, however, was not the language. It was the person who had written it. Letters from Zaatar was my first novel. It was written with all the impatience, urgency, and rawness of someone who didn’t yet know how to fine-tune language but desperately wanted to tell a story. There is a certain honesty in that kind of writing. Also a certain recklessness.

Revisiting it now has been strangely tender and unexpectedly moving.

For those of you who are meeting the book for the first time, it follows Zohrab Anmahouni, an Armenian-American architect in Los Angeles who accepts the unlikely post of Consul General to the distant kingdom of Zaatar. Like most bad decisions, it begins as a temporary escape. Instead, he finds himself trapped in a landscape of suffocating heat, political absurdity, and a loneliness he has never known.

Separated from his wife and children, Zohrab watches his life unravel as he tries to make sense of a city that is crumbling around him, a river that shifts between drought and sudden floods, and a government that seems to exist only in name.

Left alone with a handful of eccentric locals, fading responsibilities, and too much time to think, Zohrab drifts through desire, guilt, memory, and the slow unraveling of his marriage. What begins as an escape from Los Angeles quietly becomes a confrontation with himself.

Part political satire, part marital drama, part existential comedy, Letters From Zaatar explores what happens when escape turns into entrapment, and when exile becomes the only place you can finally hear your own voice.

Tender, absurd, and hauntingly human, this is a novel about belonging nowhere… and discovering who you are because of it.

If the book speaks to you, I hope you’ll consider ordering a copy on Amazon, in paperback or on Kindle. And if you do read it, I would genuinely love to hear what you think.

Here’s how you can order, and please share this post.