The Sandcastle Girls

Chris Bohjalian’s fifteenth book, the historical novel The Sandcastle Girls (2012), was chosen as a Book of the Week by Oprah Winfrey and received positive reviews from publications such as USA Today.

Beginning in the present day, a young woman, Laura Petrosian, a novelist living in New York, is married with two children. Laura knows that her grandfather was Armenian and that he tried to keep some of his native culture alive when he moved to the United States, but she has not given much thought to her family history despite knowing it contains tragic and traumatic incidents.

While still in college, Laura took an assignment from the school paper to cover a resolution by the House of Representatives to declare the attack on ethnic Armenians by Turkey in 1915 genocide. Laura does a lot of research for her article at the Armenian Library and Museum of America, where she finds a photo of a young Armenian woman who carried her dead infant for days on a forced march through the desert.



Though Laura finds the photo disturbing, she does not follow up on it at the time. It is not until much later, when Laura is middle-aged, that the image comes back to haunt her. An old friend calls Laura up to tell her that a picture of a woman with Laura’s last name is being used to promote an exhibition of photos covering the Armenian genocide. Laura is surprised to find that it is the same picture that she encountered years earlier, only now the woman in it is named as Karine Petrosian.

Laura attends the exhibition of pictures and then returns to the Armenian Library to try to get to the bottom of the photograph. She is shocked to find that the Library records contain correspondence between Laura’s grandfather Armen Petrosian and her grandmother Elizabeth Endicott. Laura did not know that her grandparents were caught up in the Armenian genocide, though she thinks that it explains some of her family history, including how moody and silent her grandfather tended to be

As Laura continues to learn more about the events of the past, the narrative shifts back to 1915, adopting the point of view of Laura’s grandmother Elizabeth. Elizabeth arrives in Aleppo, Syria with her father and a group of missionaries who have come to help people displaced by the Armenian genocide. Elizabeth is a nurse, and so she finds herself giving basic medical care to people who have escaped horrible torture and have sometimes walked for days through the desert to safety.



Elizabeth meets a young Armenian engineer, Armen, who has lost his wife and infant daughter to the genocide. Armen is working with a pair of German engineers who have come to photograph the carnage so that they can get the truth out to the world. Though photographing the refugees is outlawed, the Germans take their photographs surreptitiously and smuggle them out of the country. The photos taken by the Germans make up the exhibit of pictures that Lauren sees in the present timeline.

When Elizabeth meets Armen, she is taken by his intelligence and sensitivity. They become close friends, but when it looks as if their relationship will become romantic, Armen abruptly leaves for Egypt. However, he and Elizabeth remain in contact through their letters, in which they gradually make their true feelings known to each other. In the present timeline, Lauren reads the letters in the library archive, learning both about how her grandparents met and the horrors they witnessed during the genocide.

The details of the genocide begin to seep into Lauren’s life. She finds herself thinking about them while trying to go about daily activities. However, she still does not know who the woman in the photograph is. It is not until she reaches the end of her grandparents’ letters that she finally learns the woman’s identity. She is Armen’s wife, Karine, who did not die in the desert as Armen originally thought.



Karine’s fate is left until the end of the book. She was captured by the Turks and subjected to horrible torture. Her daughter was killed, and Karine hiked through the desert for days with the dead child in her arms. Upon finally reaching the refugee camp, she is just in time to see Armen and Elizabeth reunite. They have finally decided, through their letters, to begin a relationship in person. Upon seeing Armen looking happy and at peace with a new woman, Karine commits suicide in order to allow the pair to be together.

Elizabeth learns the truth about Karine from her father, but she decides not to tell Armen. Lauren realizes that her grandmother kept the truth from her grandfather for the entirety of their marriage.