A Summer Without Dawn

A Summer Without Dawn is an international best selling novel that tells the Armenian story in a gripping cinematic manner. The story follows a family swept up in one of history’s most sombre moments. It is a moving portrait of a people’s unyielding resolve to survive.

In the summer of 1915, days after the government orders the deportation of the Armenians, journalist Vartan Balian is imprisoned by politicians hoping to silence him. Soon, after a daring escape, he embarks on an odyssey across the vast empire in desperate search of his wife, Maro, and their son Thomas, whose own stories we gradually learn. In the ensuing years, the Balians will each confront calamities of war as well as the secrets of the human heart.

A Summer Without Dawn is an international best selling novel that tells the Armenian story in a gripping cinematic manner. The story follows a family swept up in one of history’s most sombre moments. It is a moving portrait of a people’s unyielding resolve to survive.

In the summer of 1915, days after the government orders the deportation of the Armenians, journalist Vartan Balian is imprisoned by politicians hoping to silence him. Soon, after a daring escape, he embarks on an odyssey across the vast empire in desperate search of his wife, Maro, and their son Thomas, whose own stories we gradually learn. In the ensuing years, the Balians will each confront calamities of war as well as the secrets of the human heart.

Agop J. Hacikyan, the co-author of A Summer Without Dawn, during his busy career as a university professor, dean of arts, and writer, has been active in lecturing, scholarly research, creative writing, and publishing.

He is the author of over two dozens books, including five novels, academic works, textbooks, monographs and hundreds of articles written mostly in English and published in Canada, the U.S., Europe, and Turkey. His books are translated into French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Armenian, Greek, Turkish, Rumanian, etc. His novel, Un été sans aube (A Summer Without Dawn), is already translated into eight languages. It has been on the best-seller lists in Canada and in France for months. The Turkish translation has made a major impact in Turkey and it is in its third printing. The book is now out for the first time in the US by an American publisher. Nour and Nayiri, a sequel  in English, to A Summer Without Dawn  has just been  submitted for publication.

Hacikyan is the principal editor and author of all three volumes of The Heritage of Armenian Literature (3000 pages), published by Wayne State University Press).  They make the entire Armenian literary treasures, history and culture accessible to the non-Armenian-speaking readers, researchers and students. These books are already in use in various American and British universities. Hacikyan  is pleased when his colleagues and critics remind him that never before there has been either in English or in any other language a single comprehensive source to which readers could turn for information about and samples of the broad spectrum of the literature of this ancient civilization,.

This eminent scholar is also the translator and editor of major Armenian poets, short story writers, and novelists; Furthermore, his two-year secondment by Ottawa to the United Nations in Geneva, and his appointments as visiting professor of literature and linguistics to the Universities of Geneva, Besançon, and Paris, and his many tours around the world with the National Defence College of Canada have given him the opportunity to get acquainted closely with the international diplomatic, academic and literary circles.

Hacikyan, now “Emeritus Professor” of Literary Studies, is the recipient of the Commemorative Queen Elizabeth medal for the 125th anniversary of the Confederation of Canada; also decorated by the Republic of France with the medal of La Décoration française Rayonnement culturel, and also by His Holiness Vazken I of Armenia, with the medal of Mesrop Mashtots, and with the gold medal of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Armenia for his lifetime work to spread the Armenian culture and literary treasures, and make recognize the Armenian Genocide.  Recently, in 2009 Hacikyan was awarded the Movses Khorenatsi medal — Armenia’s highest civilian honour and presented to individuals by the president of the Republic for their contribution in the fields of culture, arts, literature, and humanities.
 
The Lamppost Diary is his last novel which came out in London on last October by Telegram Books and it will also be published in the States within a few months.