Named one of the best books of 2001 by the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, and a Notable Book by The New York Times, Micheline Marcom's impressive debut novel, Three Apples Fell from Heaven, depicted the lives shattered by the Turkish government's brutal campaign that resulted in the deaths of more than a million Armenians. Marcom's second novel, The Daydreaming Boy, carries forward the story of the refugees from the twentieth century's first genocide, and it shows the growth of this young writer as a gifted and fearless stylist. Vaheacute; Tcheubjian is an upstanding, unremarkable member of the Armenian community of Beirut in the 1960s. He and his wife attend concerts, dinners, partake of the sophisticated, continental culture that marked pre-civil war Beirut as a cosmopolitan capital on the Mediterranean, the "Paris of the Middle East." But inside, he is in turmoil-wracked by memories of the escape from the campaign of genocide, the years spent in an Armenian orphanage, the brutalities of his fellow orphans, ferocious and desperate and unloved. Vaheacute; seeks refuge in an outrageous and graphic fantasy life that flirts dangerously with emotional catastrophe, just as the Beirut he has come to adopt as his home edges toward destruction.