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The inspiring story of a young Armenian’s harrowing escape from genocide and of his granddaughter’s quest to retrace his steps

Growing up, Dawn MacKeen heard fragments of her grandfather Stepan’s story, of how he was swept up in the deadly mass deportation of Armenians during World War I and of how he miraculously managed to escape.

Longing for a fuller picture of Stepan’s life — and the lost home her family fled — Dawn travels to Turkey and Syria, across a landscape still rife with tension. Using his newly discovered journals as a guide, she reconstructs her grandfather’s odyssey to the far reaches of the Ottoman Empire. There, he found himself alone and on a grueling death march along the banks of the Euphrates River.

Part reportage, part memoir, The Hundred Year Walk alternates between Stepan’s tale of resilience and Dawn’s remarkable journey, giving us a rare eyewitness account of the twentieth century’s first large-scale genocide. It’s filled with edge of your seat escapes and accounts of lifesaving kindnesses in the harsh desert. And it’s in the desert that Dawn finds the unexpected: the secret to Stepan’s survival.
 

Source: Goodreads