Extract from The Secret of Karabakh by Fidan Bagirova

Today it's my stop on The Secret of Karabakh blog tour and it's my pleasure to share an extract from this debut novel from Fidan Bagirova.

You are not who you think you are. Your future is not what you think it will be. You are in danger...

Alana Fulton, the beloved only child of wealthy American parents, is bookish and passionate about the past. In the final stages of a PhD in archaeology at the University of Cambridge, Alana's future is bright and assured. Then comes the anonymous note: You are not who you think you are. Suddenly, everything in her life - including her sense of self - is under assault.

As Alana flees unknown pursuers and mounting danger, all that is familiar crumbles away. In time, it becomes clear to Alana why she's being pursued; and she must ask herself where her loyalties and her future lie.

Prologue 

High on a green hillside, by a rock outcrop shaped like a cat curled in sleep, lay a young mother, her face turned to the earth. The cold wind snatched at the blood-soaked hem of her embroidered headscarf. Her arm was outstretched toward a child, dropped like a sack a yard away. The eyes of the dead child, a little girl, were closed. Her hair was the color of licorice, matted with dirt and blood. Wrapped around her neck was a pink woolen scarf decorated with chocolate-brown rabbits and butter-yellow ducklings; its fringe trailed in the congealing puddle of gore thrown from her body by a soldier’s bullet. Between woman and child, like an umbilicus, was a twisted gray plaid blanket, twined round the woman’s torso and the child’s limbs. 

They had been sheltering in the lee of the rock when the soldiers found them. The cracks of the two gunshots had echoed from the cat-rock and down the valley, stopping the screams and the pleas for mercy, halting the woman’s exhortations to spare the child. No mercy came, only more gunshots farther down the valley. 

Snow fell, dusting the grass with silver, blurring the outlines of the corpses scattered among the stones and bushes, a tide-wrack marking the limit of their exodus. Daylight faded quickly into a February dusk, shrouding the atrocity, leaving it to the eyes of the goats. 

The soldiers were all indoors that night. If their souls were troubled, it showed little in their faces. They were at home here, in this place they had won for their people. Those enemies, those women and children, those workers and tradesmen and pensioners, from whom they had violently wrested it, had been usurpers, and had been put to the usurper’s fate. Not murder, but execution. 

So the murderers told themselves. 

About the Author

Fidan Bagirova is a writer, sculptor and multimedia artist. She was born in Geneva, to parents from Azerbaijan. They, like hundreds of thousands of others, lost everything during the Armenian invasion described in The Secret of Karabakh, and for Fidan, writing this novel has been a way of expressing her longing for the Azerbaijani people’s identity and stolen heritage.