People Who Are Always With Me

I stumbled across this book in my parents’ library and decided to read it — in the original Russian, as the book has never been fully translated and published in English.

It’s a family saga with an unusual literary voice — a story about relationships within a family and between neighbours; about hardship and love; about hatred and kindness; about what it means to be human.

The book is steeped in Armenian culture: the cuisine, the traditions and, of course, the people. It was genuinely interesting to glimpse a completely different and unfamiliar way of life. The writing is full of descriptions of Armenian landscapes, which were hard to picture without any personal experience of the country — but fascinating nonetheless.

There are funny moments and touching ones. In places — maybe throughout the whole book — it felt like the author was drawing from her own life or that of people she knew, given how detailed everything is. There are a lot of descriptions of everything and everyone. Only after finishing and writing this review did I find out the book is considered autobiographical, which made a lot of sense.