Vartan Manukyan is a 29 year old prisoner in a Soviet Gulag in Siberia, who has just been given a death sentence; three nights in solitary confinement. Odinochka delves into the mind of this single, forgotten prisoner, and unveils the story of a man haunted by memories of his youth, growing up in an orphanage in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. Caught in a siege in the city of Van, he and his friends are left with no choice but to participate in its defense. The novel follows his attempt to make sense of the world around him in the harshness of the orphanage and the turmoil of...