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Thomas de Waal's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Thomas de Waal recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Thomas de Waal's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen

Recommended by Thomas de Waal, and 1 others.

Thomas de WaalIt’s a story of survival, although of great tragedy because his parents are lost in the 1915 genocide. (Source)

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2
Fascinating Narrative Of An Armenian Immigrant And The Inspiring Meaning He Found In American Way Of Life. less
Recommended by Thomas de Waal, and 1 others.

Thomas de WaalThis is a very affirming story of someone who has overcome the experience of immigration and tragedy and makes it in America. (Source)

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3

Burning Orchards

Gurgen Marhari's controversial novel, Burning Orchards, is set in the Ottoman city of Van, Eastern Anatolia, during the period leading up to the Armenian rebellion of 1915 and relates the epic story of the events which culminated in the catastrophe of the following years, wonderfully told by one of the great writers emerging from Soviet Armenia. Written with an abiding humanity, Mahari's characters are portrayed as complex and flawed - neither hero nor villain but keenly observed and evoked with a tender humour. Burning Orchards offers a version of events leading up to the siege of Van... more
Recommended by Thomas de Waal, and 1 others.

Thomas de WaalIt’s told very much from the inside and it’s very satirical about the Armenian revolutionary parties and about the role they played in provoking and precipitating Turkish violence. (Source)

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4
Originally published in Armenian in 1972.

Armenian Aram Haigaz was only 15 when he lost his father, brothers, many relatives and neighbors, all killed or dead of starvation when enemy soldiers surrounded their village. He and his mother were put into a forced march and deportation of Armenians into the Turkish desert, part of the systematic destruction of the largely Christian Armenian population in 1915 by the Ottoman Empire. His mother urged Aram to convert to Islam in order to survive, and on the fourth day of the march, a Turk agreed to take this young convert into his...
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Recommended by Thomas de Waal, and 1 others.

Thomas de WaalThe extraordinary story of an Armenian boy who lives as a Kurd for his teenage years. (Source)

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5

The Butter Battle Book

Illus. in full color.
"Dr. Seuss chronicles the feud between the Yooks and the Zooks from slingshots through sophisticated weaponry, until each side has the capacity to destroy the world. The language amuses, the drawings are zesty and humorous, and the demand for this book will be large."-- "School Library Journal."

"Provocative, packs an allegorical punch. The parade of increasingly elaborate (and ridiculous) armaments makes a telling point."-- "Booklist."
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Recommended by Thomas de Waal, and 1 others.

Thomas de WaalI was reading this to my daughter and I suddenly realised it should be compulsory bedtime reading for all children in the Caucasus because it’s actually about ethnic conflict. Well, it’s more explicitly about the Cold War, but I read it through my Caucasian lens. It’s about the Yooks and the Zooks and it’s about 20 pages long. (Source)

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6
What do "Abu Sindi", "Timothy Sean McCormack", "Saro", and "Commander Avo" all have in common? They were all aliases for Monte Melkonian.  But who was Monte Melkonian? In his native California he was once a kid in cut-off jeans, playing baseball and eating snow cones.  Europe denounced him as an international terrorist.  His adopted homeland of Armenia decorated him as a national hero who led a force of 4000 men to victory in the Armenian enclave of Mountainous Karabagh in Azerbaijan.  Why Armenia? Why adopt the cause of a remote corner of the Caucasus whose peoples had scattered throughout... more
Recommended by Thomas de Waal, and 1 others.

Thomas de WaalThis really looks at the other side. The weakest part of Goltz’s book is that he makes only one trip to Armenia and it’s a very unsatisfactory chapter, so this is the other side of that war over Nagorno-Karabakh – which I myself have written a book on. This is an extraordinary read and it tells you the similarities and yet the differences between the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis. (Source)

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7
In its first years as an independent state, Azerbaijan was a prime example of post-Soviet chaos - beset by coups and civil strife and astride an ethnic, political and religious divide. Author Goltz was detoured in Baku in mid-1991 and decided to stay, this diary is the record of his experiences. less
Recommended by Thomas de Waal, Nigar Hasan-Zadeh, and 2 others.

Thomas de WaalTo my mind this is the best on-the-ground inside account of what it was like to live in the margins of the Soviet Union as it broke up. (Source)

Nigar Hasan-ZadehGoltz was one of the rare reporters in the 1980s and 90s who was actually in Baku. (Source)

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8

Ali and Nino

First published in Vienna in 1937, this classic story of romance and adventure has been compared to Dr. Zhivago and Romeo and Juliet.  Its mysterious author was recently the subject of a feature article in the New Yorker, which has inspired a forthcoming biography. Out of print for nearly three decades until the hardcover re-release last year, Ali and Nino is Kurban Said's masterpiece. It is a captivating novel as evocative of the exotic desert landscape as it is of the passion between two people pulled apart by culture, religion, and war.

It is the eve...
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Thomas de WaalThe Romeo and Juliet of the Caucasus. (Source)

Per GahrtonThis is the story of a guy and a girl from different ethnic and religious groups falling in love, and the surroundings give this depth. Tbilisi now seems completely Georgian, but 100 years ago there were more Armenians than Georgians. (Source)

Nigar Hasan-ZadehIt’s a novel, and really it’s a love story between a young Muslim Azeri man and a Christian Georgian woman and it’s full of historical, cultural, political facts. (Source)

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9

My Grandmother

A Memoir

When Fethiye Cetin was growing up in the small Turkish town of Maden, she knew her grandmother as a happy and universally respected Muslim housewife. It would be decades before her grandmother told her the truth: that she was by birth a Christian and an Armenian, that her name was not Seher but Heranush, that most of the men in her village had been slaughtered in 1915, that she, along with most of the women and children, had been sent on a death march. She had been saved (and torn from her mother’s arms) by the Turkish gendarme captain who went on to adopt her. But she knew she still had... more
Recommended by Thomas de Waal, Hugh Pope, and 2 others.

Thomas de WaalIt’s an extraordinary story that broke the taboo in Turkey, almost overnight, about the fact that so many people in Turkey had Armenian grandparents, or great-grandparents. (Source)

Hugh PopeThat’s exactly right. It’s a very empathetic, straightforward read. It’s short. It gives an insight into the ethnic origins of Turkey today that no one has been talking about until very recently. A lot of Armenians were deported and a lot were massacred, but a lot also stayed behind in Turkish families. This book is about someone discovering, quite unexpectedly, that her grandmother is one of... (Source)

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10
Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus is a gripping account of the developmental dynamics involved in the collapse of Soviet socialism. Fusing a narrative of human agency to his critical discussion of structural forces, Georgi M. Derluguian reconstructs from firsthand accounts the life story of Musa Shanib—who from a small town in the Caucasus grew to be a prominent leader in the Chechen revolution. In his examination of Shanib and his keen interest in the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, Derluguian discerns how and why this dissident intellectual became a nationalist warlord. more
Recommended by Thomas de Waal, Simon Pirani, and 2 others.

Thomas de WaalWell, it’s quite a mouthful, isn’t it? I think the title of the book probably puts off a lot of people who would otherwise be very interested in it. Georgi Derluguian is a fascinating man. He’s an Armenian from the North Caucasus who worked in Africa in Soviet times as an interpreter. He’s a sociologist who then emigrated to Chicago, so he’s got this amazingly sophisticated understanding of the... (Source)

Simon PiraniI mentioned before that central to the Putin project was this savage military expedition into Chechnya in 2000 – a war Putin essentially won where Yeltsin had lost. What’s wonderful about this book is that it’s by an academic, a sociologist who comes from southern Russia but who now works in the United States. It takes an unusual look at social relationships in that part of the world, but it does... (Source)

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