Please join us at Belmont Books for Sarah Ignatius and Donna Gordon’s discussion of The Kaleidoscope of Destiny.

The year is 1915. War rages in Europe while Armenians in the Ottoman Empire find themselves unfairly blamed for a major military defeat. Cooped up at home, fourteen-year-old Arakel tries to ignore rumors of arrests and beatings of Armenians by focusing on the journey he’ll take with his two best friends, one Turkish and the other Armenian, on the Silk Road to China in two years, certain war will be over by then.

His life is torn apart when Turkish officials arrest almost all of the Armenian men in his town, including his father and older brother, and order nearly all of the remaining Armenians into exile in the desert amidst rumors of massacres. Tormented by armed guards, Arakel doesn’t grasp what’s happening until they strip his family of food, water, and their meager possessions and force them across the Euphrates River, where bloated corpses float by. He has crossed into the land of the dead. In a desperate struggle to survive, Arakel must rely on people of different faiths and backgrounds-Bedouins, Kurds, Arab camel drivers, Turks, Germans, even a wandering dervish-people he considers enemies-but how can he trust them?

In a barbaric world, he confronts what lies deep within the human heart. With an elegance reaffirming our collective humanity, The Kaleidoscope of Destiny reveals the courage, hope, and ingenuity to survive the darkest of times during an often-overlooked part of history and will resonate in today’s challenges.

Donna Gordon is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based writer and artist. She graduated from Brown, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, a PEN Discovery, and a Ploughshares Discovery. Her debut novel, What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me, Regal House 2022, received a starred review from Kirkus Review and was named among the 100 best Indie novels of 2023, having been described as, “A soulful journey that offers surprises and unforeseen victories.” The novel also received the 2022 Whirling Prose Prize from Etchings Press, and was the November pick for the Brown Book Club of Boston. It was named by the Independent Book Review as one of the top 45 they’re excited about for 2022. Nina McLaughlin wrote in a Boston Globe review: “Gordon’s prose is lively; it rushes along with verve, humor, and heart…[She has] achieved the rare thing, a stirring, poignant story of death and love and a page-turning adventure.” She received the 2018 New Letters Publication Award for her short story, “Primates,” and has published fiction, poetry, and essays nationally. 

Gordon is also a visual artist, with a focus on photography and printmaking. She received the 2024 LensCulture Jurors’ Choice award for a portrait, and was finalist for portrait series.  She received the 2024 and 2023 Julia Margaret Cameron Award, winner in portrait series and alternative process, and honorable mention for women seen by women and landscape series. Her work has been featured in both Shots Magazine and The Hand and has been shown in both solo and group shows at the Danforth Art Museum, Soho Photo Gallery, Fitchburg Art Museum, Cape Cod Museum, ArtsWorcester, Providence Art Gallery, Bromfield Gallery, Galatea Fine Art, Concord Art Association, George Marshall Store Gallery, Site:Brooklyn, Featherstone Gallery, Union of Maine Visual Artists, Attleboro Art Museum, and Cambridge Art Association. Her work with former political prisoners culminated in “Putting Faces on the Unimaginable: Portraits and Interviews with Former Prisoners of Conscience,” exhibited at Harvard’s Fogg Museum. She’s represented by Bromfield Gallery, Boston.