FRESNO — Best-selling author Chris Bohjalian will speak about his new book, The Guest Room, at 7 p.m. on Friday, January 8, 2016, in the Leon S. and Pete P. Peters Educational Center Auditorium (west end of the Save Mart Center) on the Fresno State campus.
The lecture is co-sponsored by the Armenian Studies Program of Fresno State and the Hamazkayin Armenian Educational and Cultural Society.
Bohjalian’s The Guest Room is a spellbinding tale of a party gone horribly wrong: two men lie dead in a suburban living room, two women are on the run from police and a marriage is ripping apart at the seams. Bohjalian brilliantly — and chillingly — shows how life can change in an instant.
“The Guest Room pulses quick as a page-turner, but its concerns run deep into the moral consequences following an eruption of violence in ordinary lives,” says Charles Frazier, National Book Award-winning author of Cold Mountain.
Bohjalian is the author of 15 novels, including the bestsellers Midwives and The Sandcastle Girls. Sandcastle Girls (2012) is about the Armenian Genocide and its century-long denial by Turkey. The novel includes two stories in one: the story of Elizabeth Endicott and Armen Petrosian, lovers who meet in Syria during the Genocide; and the story of Laura Petrosian, their granddaughter, who after a century tries to understand why they were so silent about their youth, while her suburban existence is quite different from the violent setting in which her grandparents fell in love.
Bohjalian has authored ten New York Times bestsellers and his work has been translated into roughly 30 languages and three times have become movies.