In his fifteenth book, the author brings us on a very different kind of journey. This tale travels between Aleppo, Syria, in 1915 and Bronxville, New York, in 2012, a sweeping historical love story steeped in the author's Armenian heritage, making it his most personal novel to date. When Elizabeth Endicott arrives in Syria, she has a diploma from Mount Holyoke College, a crash course in nursing, and only the most basic grasp of the Armenian language....

In a novel overflows with a kitchen sink's worth of zany characters, women are front and center: Asya Kazanci, an angst-ridden 19-year-old Istanbulite is the bastard of the title; her beautiful, rebellious mother, Zeliha (who intended to have an abortion), has raised Asya among three generations of complicated and colorful female relations (including religious clairvoyant Auntie Banu and bar-brawl widow, Auntie Cevriye). The Kazanci men either die...

A mean-spirited, self-absorbed, destructive Canadian-Armenian photographer is hired to take twelve pictures of Armenian historic churches for a calendar. He takes his wife along as a translator, and as they traverse the twelve sites chosen for the calendar with their Armenian guide, their relationship begins to unravel. The photographer returns to Canada with his twelve images, but without his wife, who has gradually felt drawn to her ethnic roots...