Ruling Over the Ruins

by Kevork Ajemian

Ruling over the Ruins is the absorbing love story of a bright young Irish journalist and an aging Armenian lawyer marooned together in war-ravaged Beirut in the early 1990s. Norayr Adrouny has been stranded in the battered capital, his legal career destroyed and his family fled. Patricia Moynihan becomes intrigued by Adrouny's tales of his lost Armenian homeland newly independent from Soviet Russia, and she decides to go there in search of a news angle. She convinces him to journey back to Armenia with her where he finds his relatives he has never met and is greeted as their "head." For him, it is too late. He discovers that he feels less at home with them than Patricia-the outsider who finds their simple mountain life and strong family very compelling. She sees a way to bring their suffering to the notice of a passive world. While Norayr Adrouny is still alone-unable to reconnect, the rootless victim of genocide and diaspora and civil war.

262 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1998