On January 15, the AGBU Central Office welcomed New York Times bestselling author Chris Bohjalian for a discussion of his new novel The Guest Room. The event was co-sponsored by the AGBU New York Special Events Committee (NYSEC), the Armenian Network—Greater New York Region, Hamazkayin Armenian Educational and Cultural Society of New York, the New York Armenian Students’ Association, St. Leon’s Armenian Church and the Tekeyan Cultural Association of Greater New York.
Bohjalian began the talk by explaining the impetus for the novel, a literary thriller that explores the trafficking of two Armenian women in the United States. The idea came to him while he was in Armenia with his wife and daughter: “I was waiting to take my daughter’s friend to the airport at 3:30 am and saw a young woman—maybe 17 years old—who was clearly an escort and clearly paying off the bellman to go upstairs at the hotel. This was heartbreaking for me as a father, because she was so young and it was in Armenia. I began to wonder: is there a story in a young woman such as this? My books always begin with characters. Never a social issue.”
This encounter led Bohjalian to research prostitution and human trafficking in the Caucasus and the Middle East. He came to understand the economics of human trafficking and sexual slavery and the billion dollar industry it composes. In the Caucasus, the rise of human trafficking coincided with the fall of the Soviet Union when the economies of the republics were in disrepair.
Chris Bohjalian is the author of eighteen books, including Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands; The Sandcastle Girls; Skeletons at the Feast, The Double Bind and Midwives. His novel Midwives was a number one New York Times bestseller and a selection of Oprah’s Book Club. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and three of his novels have become films—Secrets of Eden, Midwives and Past the Bleachers.
