Fearcatcher

In a small village in Soviet Armenia, a baby girl is found abandoned in the woods, with one hand forced out of her swaddle. All her life Ruzan Garsevanian will wonder what she was reaching for the night the fearcatcher’s husband found her and took her home to his mysterious wife. The fearcatcher is a woman at once at the center of her community and at the very outskirts of it. To men, she is a threat to their traditional Armenian way of living; to women, she is the answer to all of their fears. For the daughter she has adopted, she is the woman Ruzan can never truly know.

Trained by Ripsimeh in the ways of fearcatching, as she grows, Ruzan yearns for freedom: from the hypocrisy and insularity of her village, and from the hand of destiny her mother swears will eventually take Ruzan in its grasp--for when a fearcatcher dies, a fearcatcher is born. In the capital city of Yerevan, where revolution brews, Ruzan is determined to carve out a life on her own terms. But when disaster threatens the lives of both the family she has left behind and the family she has newly begun, Ruzan must decide whether she will become unknowable to her own daughter, too.

Lush and mythic yet profoundly intimate, Naira Kuzmich’s posthumous debut novel is a journey through perpetual questions of fear and of fate.

Naira Kuzmich was born in Armenia and raised in the Los Angeles enclave of Little Armenia. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in West Branch, Blackbird, Ecotone, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015, The Threepenny Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of the short story collection In Everything I See Your Hand. She passed away in 2017 from lung cancer.