{"product_id":"the-sandcastle-girls-a-novel","title":"The Sandcastle Girls: A Novel","description":"\u003cp\u003eOver the course of his career  New York Times bestselling novelist Chris Bohjalian has taken readers on a spectacular array of journeys. Midwives brought us to an isolated Vermont farmhouse on an icy winters night and a home birth gone tragically wrong. The Double Bind perfectly conjured the Roaring Twenties on Long Islandand a young social workers descent into madness. And Skeletons at the Feast chronicled the last six months of World War Two in Poland and Germany with nail-biting authenticity. As The Washington Post Book World has noted  Bohjalian writes the sorts of books people stay awake all night to finish. In his fifteenth book  The Sandcastle Girls  he brings us on a very different kind of journey. This spellbinding tale travels between Aleppo  Syria  in 1915 and Bronxville  New York  in 2012a sweeping historical love story steeped in the authors Armenian heritage  making it his most personal novel to date. When Elizabeth Endicott arrives in Syria  she has a diploma from Mount Holyoke College  a crash course in nursing  and only the most basic grasp of the Armenian language. The First World War is spreading across Europe  and she has volunteered on behalf of the Boston-based Friends of Armenia to deliver food and medical aid to refugees of the Armenian genocide. There  Elizabeth becomes friendly with Armen  a young Armenian engineer who has already lost his wife and infant daughter. When Armen leaves Aleppo to join the British Army in Egypt  he begins to write Elizabeth letters  and comes to realize that he has fallen in love with the wealthy  young American woman who is so different from the wife he lost.Flash forward to the present  where we meet Laura Petrosian  a novelist living in suburban New York. Although her grandparents ornate Pelham home was affectionately nicknamed the Ottoman Annex  Laura has never really given her Armenian heritage much thought. But when an old friend calls  claiming to have seen a newspaper photo of Lauras grandmother promoting an exhibit at a Boston museum  Laura embarks on a journey back through her familys history that reveals love  lossand a wrenching secret that has been buried for generations.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44989248798773,"sku":"ByrdShop_0307990826","price":59.55,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780307990822.jpg?v=1771063343","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-sandcastle-girls-a-novel","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}