'Could it be possible so much killing took place here? No stench of corpses, no evidence of spilled blood. Mass graves shouldn't be this beautiful. On this serene, cloud-curdled day, the atrocities seem a fabrication, tales told to frighten children.

ANOUSH PAKRADOUNIAN steps onto the tarmac and feels Levantine heat on her cheeks like a caress. She hasn't been back to Beirut since she was sixteen. Now, at twenty-nine, she thinks she knows where she's going. She thinks she knows who is right and who is wrong. Yet nothing about her family's past, the history of her ancestors or her childhood in this city is black and white. There's her father, killer and killed. He shot children, babies. He terrorised women in Palestinian camps. When he died chained to a wall, he still thought himself a hero. Her Armenian grandmother. Survivor of genocide. Raped, robbed, left for dead. Sold to a Turk in the desert when she was fifteen. Her grandfather, a militiaman famous for his hatred of Muslims. And in dreams, in the space between words - bone, ash, sky - stories of a lake witness to atrocity, to a loss she can't yet explain.' (Source: Author's website)