(AINA) -- In her new book, Claire Weibel Yacoub recounts the odyssey of an Assyrian in a historical novel about exile, war, and the unbroken will of a people.

With Les tribulations de Paulus l'Assyrien (The Tribulations of Paulus the Assyrian), the French historian and specialist on the Assyro-Chaldean question, Claire Weibel Yacoub, presents a moving novel based on a true story. The book, which has just been published by L'Harmattan (ISBN 978-2-336-64526-1, €14), takes the reader from a Persian village on Lake Urmia via the Caucasus, Argentina, and France all the way to the Syrian Jazira in Mesopotamia.

At the centre stands Paulus, born in 1889 in Khosrova in northwestern Iran. The young Assyrian, deeply rooted in the ancient Mesopotamian culture, is forced to leave his homeland in 1908. His journey first takes him to Tiflis (Tbilisi), later across the oceans to Argentina. The outbreak of the First World War changes everything: he reaches France, returns to the Caucasus after the armistice -- and there learns of the death of his parents in the massacres of the Assyrian genocide in 1915--1918. The hoped-for family reunion turns into a nightmare.

Related: The Assyrian Genocide

An unexpected turning point follows: after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which had fought on the side of the Central Powers (the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria) and lost the war, it had to watch as its former territories were divided among the victorious powers. France becomes the mandatory power in Syria and formed the Assyro-Chaldean Battalion within the Armée du Levant. Paulus enlists and settles with his family in the Upper Jazira in Syria. Whether this place of refuge will become his new homeland is left deliberately open by the author.

The publisher's announcement succinctly captures the book's ambition: "Inspired by a true story, this account traces the tribulations of Paulus the Assyrian and, through him, those of his people who still stand upright."

Claire Weibel Yacoub, author and co-author of several scholarly works on Assyro-Chaldean history, including Le rêve brisé des Assyro-Chaldéens, Cerf 2011, has herself visited many of the places mentioned in the book. With this historical-novelistic narrative she continues her long-standing work of making the history of the often-overlooked Assyrian people vivid and accessible -- a people of unbroken resilience that continues to resist to this day despite genocide, displacement, and exile.