Rebel Land: Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town

＂A finely written, brave, and very personal book.＂ -Orhan Pamuk

In 2001, Christopher de Bellaigue wrote a story for The New York Review of Books, in which he briefly discussed the killing and deportation of half a million Armenians from Turkey in 1915. These massacres, he suggested, were best understood as part of the struggles that attended the end of the Ottoman Empire. Upon publication, the Review was besieged with letters asserting that this was not war but genocide. How had he gotten it so wrong? De Bellaigue set out for Turkey’s troubled southeast to discover what really happened. What emerged is both an intellectual detective story and a reckoning with memory and identity. Rebel Land unravels the enigma of the Turkish twentieth century-a time that contains the death of an empire, the founding of a nation, and the near extinction of a people.

Christopher de Bellaigue has worked as a journalist in South Asia and the Middle East, writing for The Economist, the Guardian, and The New York Review of Books. He is the award-winning author of four books, has made several BBC television and radio documentaries, and has been a visiting fellow at the universities of Harvard and Oxford. He lives in London.