My Grandmother, by Fethiye Çetin, trans Maureen Freely

Fethiye Çetin's grandmother played a central role in her childhood when she was growing up in Maden, a provincial Turkish town in the 1950s, especially after her father died when she was six. She knew her grandmother as a warm, resourceful and respected Turkish housewife. Years later, in 1975, her grandmother revealed that she was Armenian by birth, that in 1915 the men of her village had been murdered, the women sent on a death march, and that she had been torn from her mother's arms by a Turkish police captain, who later adopted her. Heranus, who was to become Seher, never saw her birth family again, although her parents and her brother survived and settled in New York.

Çetin's gripping and thought-provoking memoir inhabits the fault lines between personal recall, inherited memory and history. It reaches towards an understanding, if not of the events, then of their aftermath. Her spare and elegant prose may be easy to read, but this is no lightweight, sentimental book. An unassuaged loss sings through Çetin's allusive, understated style. Maureen Freely's translation captures the style and tone perfectly.

History becomes a family secret kept even at Heranus's funeral. Politics is never spoken of and yet its presence is palpable. The silences it imposes lead to erasures, not just the changing of names, but the unspeakable truths those names commemorate. The genocide is both a historical fact and an unbearably personal secret Heranus shares only with her granddaughter, shocked by her hidden heritage that "turned the known world on its head."

Çetin proves herself worthy of such a legacy by bearing witness to her grandmother's remarkable resilience and goodness in the face of tragedy. Childhood reminiscences - her irascible grandfather's appetite and tempers, family meals, laundry day, the pastries cooked secretly to commemorate Easter - are cast in a new light.

Remembering and reconciling Turkish and Armenian histories and identities is both emotionally charged, and politically contentious. Çetin is a courageous writer; challenging official Turkish history can still have fatal consequences, as the assassination of Hrant Dink in 2007 has shown. Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, helped Çetin in her search for the family. She was to act as his lawyer when he was prosecuted for "insulting Turkishness". Çetin ends her story in a New Jersey kitchen, as she dances the halay with octogenarian Aunt Marge, the sister Heranus was never to meet. Such small private celebrations make significant strides in reconciliation between Turks and Armenians. This moving testimony transcends politics and brings the Armenian tragedy to life with tenderness as well as sadness.