Erika de Vasconcelos’s second novel is more ambitious in scope than her acclaimed debut. Where My Darling Dead Ones concerned itself with the personal histories of a family of women, Between the Stillness and the Grove seeks to embrace the whole of recent Armenian history.

Against the bleak background of communist Armenia unfolds the story of Dzovig, a young woman readers might remember from the end of My Darling Dead Ones, and Vecihe, the mother of Dzovig’s doomed lover, Tomas. The lives of both are marked by the horror of the genocide visited upon their ancestors by the Turks. Each runs from the past, only to be brought up sharp against it again.

Dzovig runs the farthest – to Portugal, where, despite her best efforts, she is drawn into a relationship as intense, in its own way, as the one she shared with Tomas. In Armenia, Vecihe longs for news of the woman she considers her daughter, and among her friends in Portugal, Dzovig is a beautiful enigma. For readers, however, it is sometimes hard to see her appeal.

But beyond her, the book is amply peopled. Some characters – Dzovig’s sister Anahid, Tomas himself – remain purposefully indistinct. Others burst with life, especially Vecihe, to whom more pages should have been devoted. And though de Vasconcelos is not the dabbest hand with dialogue, particularly when she uses it to outline politics and philosophies, her writing on the subject of Vecihe’s past and present life is warm and achingly real.

So persuasive is de Vasconcelos’s power of description, in fact, it is easy to overlook broadly drawn coincidences and sometimes stilted dialogue. The brutalities she turns her pen to are convincingly rendered with an understanding of human frailty. “Leave it, leave it,” Vecihe’s mother urges as she stumbles too close to detailing the degradation she has seen. And for much of the novel, Vecihe and Dzovig do. But as they move closer to each other, they must also move closer to themselves, to their individual truths and to the truths about their country and its history.