Anatolia Sevoyants, Voske’s only surviving daughter, is the central figure in a cast of well written, if a little one-dimensional, characters. There is the blacksmith, the priest, the always-ready-to-help neighbour, and the chirping of chickens, goats, and a somewhat important peacock. While the book opens with Anatolia laying down “to breathe her last”, quite predictably, her last becomes only the first of a compelling transformation which offers potential release from the inherited curse and a second chance at romantic love.

With the curse forming the novel’s central energy source, Three Apples shares something with Nino Haratsichvili’s epic novel The Eighth Life (2019), set over a similar time period in neighbouring Georgia, which traces the perceived consequences of a cursed hot chocolate recipe on the Jashi family during the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. As with Haratischvili’s Jashis, Abgaryan’s Sevoyants – sev meaning black in the village’s language of Maran – were “a rational superstitious people who nevertheless believed in dreams and signs”. They channel their grief into superstition and mysticism, as perhaps, the only comfort in formless cruelty is the belief it is part of a divine plan. Abgaryan – who writes in Russian but is of Armenian descent – is less interested in what these signs resemble but how people construct the networks of meaning by which they live.

Three Apples is told in a fabular style, split into three sections – “For the One Who Saw”, “For the One Who Told the Story”, “For the One Who Listened” – which echo the Armenian folktale on which the title is based. Time oscillates from present to past and back again, but the narrative voice remains fixed in a monotonous but entrancing melody, as one might deliver a psalm. The narrator of Three Apples feels as though they are standing at a nearby vantage point, close enough to the detail to smell the “aroma of slices of spongy homemade bread” but at a sufficient distance to see the villagers’ story on a more cosmic timeline.