A a memoir, first published in 1945 and now keenly translated from the French by Anne Thompson-Ahmadova, which spans the tumultuous period from the author’s birth to 1924. Reflecting an era of bloodshed and terror, it should be a grim read. Instead, however, this account is an effervescent and irreverent feat of recollection and imagination—epic in sweep yet intimate in tone—that introduces the reader to an exotic, antique world and to characters so vividly drawn that their raucous voices seem to echo long after they have vanished from sight.

A love story between a Georgian princess and a noble Azeri boy set in Baku during the Russian Revolution.

Every so often a voice emerges from the archive so vivid that it seems impossible that it should ever have been forgotten.

French Azerbaijani writer Banine’s memoir of her childhood, Days of the Caucasus, is an entertaining early twentieth-century account.

This story of a family between tradition and modernity, filled with exotic and eccentric characters, of a multi-cultural place on the verge of a momentous transition in which both the traditional past and an increasingly cosmopolitan present are swept away, will be familiar to readers of such other memoirs as those of Andre Aciman or of pre-War Shanghai.The book treads some tricky ground, notably Turkish-Armenian enmity.

The sharp, witty humour with which she conveys this colourful cast and rambunctious environment hints at just how close tragedy hovered during this decade and a half of monumental change. Humorous episodes and terrible revelations alike, her playful narration defuses the threat that drives the freneticism of both kinds of event.

Banine’s childlike voice in Days in the Caucasus – sometimes to effect, sometimes sincere – serves to represent, in the same breath, the carefree exploits of childhood (a game of ‘who could spit the farthest’ and ‘secret orgies of tomato and aubergine conserve’) and the racialised, nationalised violences that impinge on them.