Her first book and the beginning of a trilogy of novels, "Three Apples Fell from Heaven" (2001), is set in Turkey between 1915–1917 and depicts the Ottoman government's genocide of the Armenian population. It was named one of the best books of the year by both "The Washington Post" and the "Los Angeles Times". Her second book in the trilogy, "The Daydreaming Boy" (2004), which earned her the 2004 Lannan Literary Fellowship as well as the 2005 PEN/USA Award for Fiction, is centered on a middle-aged survivor of the genocide living in a 1960s Beirut which itself is facing collapse. The culmination of the trilogy, "Draining the Sea" (2008), is a fierce critique of America's complicit involvement in the Guatemalan Civil War.