Gendarme

Gendarmerie Book Description American author Mark T. Mustian's novel Gendarmerie is a finely crafted story of forgetting and remembering, of lives that intersect and touch each other. Diagnosed with a brain tumor, ninety-two-year-old Emmett Conn's quiet life in Wadesboro, Georgia is turned upside down when he begins having disturbing dreams. In these dreams, he sees himself as a young gendarme named Ahmet, at the head of a deportation convoy heading towards Aleppo from the barren plains of Anatolia in 1915. After fulfilling his duty, Ahmet will be able to be sent to the front as a soldier, as he has dreamed of for a long time. However, one night, his paths cross with Araksi, a young woman from his group, who will make Ahmet question his strict beliefs and values. Determined to get to the source of these chaotic dreams, Emmett will uncover the terrible truths about both the Armenian Genocide and his own past, and find out who he is while searching for who Araksi is. Gendarmerie, which wanders on the borders of agency and does not hesitate to take the reader into the dark corridors of memory, is an impressive novel that ponders the fragility of memories and whether redemption is really possible. (From the Promotional Bulletin)