New Publication: A Week in Berlin, Armenian Genocide Survivor Story

A Week in Berlin follows Badrig Serdzovian during the Armenian Genocide in 1915, who flees to France after surviving persecution and losing his family. Now identifying as Patrick Ser to help himself adapt to French society, he hopes to rebuild his life, but memories of his former life and love refuse to stay buried. He soon discovers that his survival was only the beginning. When he gains the ability to relive and alter the past, his journey takes him across borders and years, eventually pulling him toward Berlin, a city that is on the brink of temporal collapse. There, he encounters forces determined to guard the integrity of history. As he wrestles with whether to confront or escape his past, he must decide what price he’s willing to pay to change not only his story, but time itself.

The novel masterfully explores themes of memory, trauma, exile, and the struggle to rebuild an identity after unspeakable loss. Blending historical fiction with speculative time travel, it shapes me mory itself into an act of resistance, capturing the human ache for belonging and asking whether the past can ever truly be rewritten.

Perhaps most movingly, the main character’s story is rooted in the author’s own family history. The pivotal scene in which he narrowly escapes execution by the Ottoman troops and is rescued by a carriage that arrives at the last possible moment, is drawn from the real-life account of the author’s great-grandfather, who survived the Genocide in the same way. This story, preserved on a cassette recording in Turkish and translated decades later, becomes the beating heart of the novel. By reimagining this legacy through fiction, A Week in Berlin is both a tribute and a powerful meditation on survival, identity, fate and love across time.

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Angelina Der Arakelian – Dennington is an award-winning screenwriter, poet, journalist and debut novelist. Her script for A Week in Berlin received the Best Sci-Fi Script Award at the World Film Festival in Cannes. Born into a diverse family, her literary work consistently returns to the universal themes of loss, memory, intergenerational trauma, belonging and love, examining the ways these fundamental human experiences shape identity, relationships and the enduring quest for connection and understanding.
Copies of A Week in Berlin are now available for purchase on Amazon.