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Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik |
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| English | |
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| https://arieldjanikian.com/ | |
A PROSPEROUS LIFE
THE LUMINARIES meets HOW MUCH OF THESE HILLS IS GOLD: A rags-to-riches story of survival, greed, and injustice across American history, following a family transformed by the Klondike Gold Rush
The middle daughter of struggling farmers, Alice Bush is accustomed to feeling overlooked. But when her elder sister's husband strikes a vein of gold in the Yukon Territory, Alice seizes the opportunity to finally assert herself, joining a wave of white settlers to the Klondike, where a devastating reproductive illness has left her sister in need of care.
What follows is an awakening of ambition for the quietly opportunistic Alice, who finds herself slated to produce the de-facto heir to her brother-in-law's fortune, and the beginning of a generations-long family struggle for wealth that unfolds against the icy Canadian wilderness, the booming Southern oilfields of California, and a nascent Los Angeles. Competing with Alice's maneuverings are Jim and Jane, Native Tlingit siblings forced to seek employment with Alice's family as their lives are upturned by rapid colonization her own role in which Alice is acutely aware of, but, as her wealth and influence grow, increasingly unwilling to acknowledge.
At its heart, A PROSPEROUS LIFE is a story of family loyalties: acquisitive though she may be, Alice's foremost commitment is to her sister, and she will stop at nothing to defend her honor from the threat that Jane comes to pose to their family. It is no small shock to anyone, then, when Alice and Jane's respective grandchildren, Peter and Winnie, briefly reunite as star-crossed dance partners in defiance of their relatives' deep antipathies.
Generations later, the hostilities and inequities born during the Gold Rush era are still felt: and an ailing Peter enlists his granddaughter, Anna, narrator of the novel's contemporary frame, to once and for all make amends with Jane's descendants. Now in 2015, Anna must grapple with generational guilt and her own conflicting ambitions as Peter sends her to the Klondike to bequeath a portion of her would-be inheritance to the First Nations peoples who paid the price for its creation. This proves a greater challenge than anticipated, and it isn't long before the two families are entangled once more.
Ariel's father and his family are Armenian immigrants from Egypt, and struggles against ethnic erasure were constantly on Ariel's mind as she wrote A PROSPEROUS LIFE. So, too, was the real-life Alice Berry, our author's great-great grandmother, whose letters, photographs, and self-published memoirs provided the inspiration for this novel. These original documents, along with extensive, Fulbright-funded research in the Yukon Territory, inform Ariel's rich tapestry of the historical world. The drama, though, is pure invention, and inspired by novels with the audacity to take on great sweeps of history: think Min Jin Lee's PACHINKO and Yaa Gyasi's HOMEGOING.
Ariel holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan and is the author of the dystopian novel THE OFFICE OF MERCY (Viking, 2013). Her work has been published in Tin House, Glimmer Train, The Paris Review, The Millions, and elsewhere. She's received a Fulbright and a Hopwood, among other awards, which you can find listed on her website. She lives in Washington DC with her family.
What follows is an awakening of ambition for the quietly opportunistic Alice, who finds herself slated to produce the de-facto heir to her brother-in-law's fortune, and the beginning of a generations-long family struggle for wealth that unfolds against the icy Canadian wilderness, the booming Southern oilfields of California, and a nascent Los Angeles. Competing with Alice's maneuverings are Jim and Jane, Native Tlingit siblings forced to seek employment with Alice's family as their lives are upturned by rapid colonization her own role in which Alice is acutely aware of, but, as her wealth and influence grow, increasingly unwilling to acknowledge.
At its heart, A PROSPEROUS LIFE is a story of family loyalties: acquisitive though she may be, Alice's foremost commitment is to her sister, and she will stop at nothing to defend her honor from the threat that Jane comes to pose to their family. It is no small shock to anyone, then, when Alice and Jane's respective grandchildren, Peter and Winnie, briefly reunite as star-crossed dance partners in defiance of their relatives' deep antipathies.
Generations later, the hostilities and inequities born during the Gold Rush era are still felt: and an ailing Peter enlists his granddaughter, Anna, narrator of the novel's contemporary frame, to once and for all make amends with Jane's descendants. Now in 2015, Anna must grapple with generational guilt and her own conflicting ambitions as Peter sends her to the Klondike to bequeath a portion of her would-be inheritance to the First Nations peoples who paid the price for its creation. This proves a greater challenge than anticipated, and it isn't long before the two families are entangled once more.
Ariel's father and his family are Armenian immigrants from Egypt, and struggles against ethnic erasure were constantly on Ariel's mind as she wrote A PROSPEROUS LIFE. So, too, was the real-life Alice Berry, our author's great-great grandmother, whose letters, photographs, and self-published memoirs provided the inspiration for this novel. These original documents, along with extensive, Fulbright-funded research in the Yukon Territory, inform Ariel's rich tapestry of the historical world. The drama, though, is pure invention, and inspired by novels with the audacity to take on great sweeps of history: think Min Jin Lee's PACHINKO and Yaa Gyasi's HOMEGOING.
Ariel holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan and is the author of the dystopian novel THE OFFICE OF MERCY (Viking, 2013). Her work has been published in Tin House, Glimmer Train, The Paris Review, The Millions, and elsewhere. She's received a Fulbright and a Hopwood, among other awards, which you can find listed on her website. She lives in Washington DC with her family.
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