A striking young man in his late twenties, Toros lives with his mother Meriam and younger sister Silva in south-west Turkey. It is the spring of 1956, and other than the haunting memories of the autumn, there has been little to evoke the pains of their past lives. None, in fact, except that fateful call which confronts Toros with the looming shadows of his bleak childhood. Assured of his magnificent triumph over his cruel father, he embarks on the most defining journey of his life, oblivious to the twists and turns awaiting. A novel in verse, Hyphenated Lives: Native Diasporas, interweaves a constellation of family stories with diplomatic dispatches, international relief reports, testimonies, archival photographs and newspaper clippings, to hold a mirror onto the obscured realities, contradicting demands and multifarious guises of survival under the hegemony of the perpetrator ideology. This tale is as much a study of remembering as of forgetting, as of a fractured survivor family as of a people and nation, in the bloody aftermath of a collapsing empire.
