Ariel Djanikian
Ariel Djanikian is the author of The Office of Mercy and The Prospectors. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Tin House, The Millions, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Born in Philadelphia, she holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. She currently lives in the DC area with her husband, two kids, and puppy and teaches fiction writing at Georgetown University.
The Prospectors
Ariel Djanikian
A sweeping rags-to-riches story of survival and greed across American history following a family transformed by the Klondike Gold Rush
The middle daughter of struggling California fruit farmers, Alice Bush is accustomed to feeling inferior and destitute. But when her elder sister’s husband strikes a vein of gold in the Yukon Territory, Alice finally seizes control of her destiny by joining a wave of white settlers making the dangerous trek to the Klondike. What follows is an awakening of ambition for the quietly opportunistic Alice, who, by luck and circumstance, becomes tightly intertwined in her sister and brother-in-law’s newfound fortune, as well as the beginning of a generations-long family quest for wealth that unfolds against the icy Canadian wilderness and the booming oilfields of California. One hundred years later, in 2015, Alice’s great-great-granddaughter Anna must grapple with moral conflict and questions of justice as she travels to the Klondike to bequeath her would-be inheritance to the First Nations peoples who paid the price for its creation.
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