Marina YALOYAN

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La petite pianiste d'Erevan roman_edited

The novel The Little Pianist i coming out in May 2026 with Albin Michel in France.

Yerevan, early 1990s. One winter morning, a child wakes to find that the world her parents once knew is gone.

In The Little Pianist, the collapse of the Soviet Union is not told from above, but felt from within—through cold, hunger, silence, and the quiet persistence of music.

This is the voice of a young girl coming of age as everything familiar falls away, where imagination and music become not just a means of escape, but a way to survive.

At once intimate and expansive, the novel captures that fragile moment when a child senses that something irreversible is happening—long before she has the words to understand it.

A story of memory, inner exile, and the slow emergence of a new world.

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Every single thing in our apartment now serves a single purpose: it must burn.
And yet, there is never enough to burn.

First the old recipes vanish into smoke. Then newspapers, magazines, address books, essays, school notebooks. The forests around the city burn too. The furniture. The doors. Wooden dolls. The floorboards. The clogs and the playgrounds of my childhood.

When nothing remains, the books come next.

I often reread them — one last time. I learn them by heart. I copy out whole passages, or hide them beneath my bed, or in my wardrobe under old clothes, like prisoners awaiting execution. But they are almost always discovered, and my father loses his temper.

He carries them back to the dining room and feeds them to the flames just to warm a little soup…

"The Little Pianist'"

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Educated in New York and Los Angeles, I graduated top of my class from Columbia University and University of California, Los Angeles. From an early age, my life has unfolded across shifting landscapes shaped by languages, cultures, and stories. Writing has been at the center of it all since I was ten—a private space where thought, memory, and imagination come together.

Immersed in French, Russian, and American literary traditions, I have lived between countries—Armenia, Russia, the United States, and France—and across languages, each transition subtly shaping a voice that is both international and deeply personal.

My work draws on this continual movement to explore history, identity, and what connects us across time and place, through a perspective that is both intimate and universal.

Since settling in France, I have worked as a journalist for French television before moving into print media. I am currently Director of International Affairs at Journal du Parlement and Les Nouvelles Diplomatiques, Head of International Relations at the Committee of Europe, and Professor of Geopolitics and Communication at HEC Paris.