Wearing Bunny Heads is Alina Poghosyan’s debut novel. Her protagonists are Armenian immigrants navigating ordinary life in Michigan, USA. Their days follow a familiar routine, yet their relationships and inner worlds reveal something deeper: unease within the family, the many ways one rebuilds identity and belonging in an unfamiliar society, and the catastrophe of a war that humanity still fails to prevent.

At the heart of the novel is a family: a married couple with twin children, recently arrived in Michigan. While trying to start their life over, they continuously return to their past and the events that pushed them to leave. The reader witnesses the inner world of Varduhi — a woman, wife, and mother — unraveling. Immigration has destabilized everything she once knew herself to be, leaving her feeling that family is a suffocating and yet confining place to be. Her determined attempts to conceive a third child drain her thoughts and feelings.

Woven through Varduhi’s story are two other perspectives that expand and complicate the novel’s portrait of displacement and belonging. Tigran Davtyan, a university professor, has spent most of his life in the United States, building a career, friendships, and a family on American soil. Only his childhood memories tether him to Armenia. As he develops a course on the ethics of war — studying its strategies, its justifications, its aftermath — he maintains a conspicuous distance from the very war Armenia has gone through, a detachment that draws sharp criticism from his wife. Nora, Varduhi’s sister-in-law and a successful biologist, embraces the liberation of uprooted life, finding its fullest expression in the freedom of anonymity.

Within the novel’s atmosphere of banality, Wearing Bunny Heads traces profound and dramatic transformations. And despite all difficulties, despair, and madness, neither the protagonists nor the reader ever loses the sense that life is, nevertheless, marvelous.