Carol Edgarian Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Carol Edgarian
Carol Edgarian is an American publisher, author, and editor. She is also the co-founder, publisher, and editor of Narrative Magazine, which is an online literary magazine.

Carol was born in New Britain, Connecticut, to first-generation American parents. She is a graduate of Phillips Andover and Stanford University.

Carol’s essays and articles have appeared in many national magazines, and she co-edited “The Writer’s Life: Intimate Thoughts on Work, Love, Inspiration, and Fame”, the collection drawn from authors’ diaries.

She is co-founder of Narrative, a non-profit, which is a leading digital publisher of poetry, fiction, ideas, and art. It is dedicated to encouraging reading without paywalls, and to supporting writers by paying them fairly for the work they turn in, and publishes hundreds of artists every year and is read widely across all generations, around the globe, and in schools. Its whole library of thousands of pieces of literature by celebrated writers and by the best emerging authors is available for free.

She’s a founder of Narrative in the Schools, programs which provide free resources and libraries to students and teachers all around the world.

She won the ANC Freedom Prize for “Rise the Euphrates”. O Magazine selected “Three Stages of Amazement” as a Top Pick. The novel was also a New York Times Best Seller during it first week of publication and it was an Indiebound Pick of the Month. “Vera” was an O Magazine Most Anticipated Read, and an Indiebound Pick of the Month.

“Rise the Euphrates” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 1994. A novel reaching back to the year 1915, when Casard (just nine years old) witnesses the massacre of her whole family during the Armenian genocide. Casard emigrates to America to put such an unspeakable past behind her. However while the years go by and Araxie (Casard’s only daughter) marries outside of the clan, making her husband and their kids odar (outsiders), the rift between mom and daughter threatens to tear the family apart yet again.

It falls on Seta, the lyrical narrator of the novel and Casard’s granddaughter, to alter the legacy of this family. The daughter assumes what was unfinished during the mom’s life, which Seta will come to learn.

Caught between the cultures of America and Armenia in her Connecticut town, Seta faces the fiercest of divisions: the one inside of herself. The wisdom that she gains frees the next generation in Carol’s groundbreaking and stunningly original novel.

“Three Stages of Amazement” is the second stand alone novel and was released in 2011. A richly compassionate and sweeping novel about ambition, marriage, and the reclaiming of love.

Many love stories conclude with marriage, but rare is the love story that starts with one, already worn and already promised. “Three Stages of Amazement”, set in San Francisco during the first year of Obama’s presidency, deftly plots the triumphs and struggles of Lena Rusch and Charlie Pepper. They both believe they can have it all: brilliance, sex, marriage, love, kids, and career. However life delivers tests and surprises: a ruthless business rival, a stillborn child, an economic crash, and the attentions from an old lover. Touched by ordinary hopes unmet and tragedy, Charlie and Lena have to face, for the very first time in their lives, real limitation.

Carol has created a deeply moving and panoramic story about family and business, as well as the demands of love in our time. She takes readers on a spellbinding journey inside of America today, with quite the unforgettable cast of characters, which include Cal Rusch (a Silicon Valley titan and Lena’s uncle), and Ivy (his socialite wife) who engender complication in the lives of all the people they touch: their business partners, their grown kids, friends, the workers and servants upon whom the glamorous life depends. And of course Lena herself, whose own quest for grace is this gorgeous novel’s pulse.

While Charlie and Lena, Cal and Ivy, each face the temptations of their youth and the fantasy of the redo, they find that real life is the ultimate challenge. Told with such compassion and eloquence, this is a real thriller of the heart, and is a riveting tale about finding great love, facing adversity, and gaining wisdom.

“Vera” is the third stand alone novel and was released in 2021.
Carol delivers “an enthralling and all-encompassing” novel that features an unforgettable heroine that comes of age in the aftermath of some catastrophe, and her quest for reinvention.

Meet Vera Johnson, age fifteen. She is the illegitimate daughter of Rose, the notorious proprietor of San Francisco’s most legendary bordello. Vera’s grown up straddling two worlds: the quiet domestic life of the family that’s been paid to raise her, and the madam’s alluring sphere, that is replete with tickets to the opera, scant morality, and surly henchmen.

Vera’s two worlds collide, on the morning of the great quake. While the city is burning and looters view with the injured, starving, and orphaned, Vera and Pie (Vera’s guileless sister) become cast adrift. Disregarding prejudices and societal norms, Vera starts imagining a new sort of life. She collaborates with Tan, her former rival, and is able to forge this unlikely family of survivors, and navigates through this disaster together.

This is a character driven novel about loyalty, power, and family. “Vera” brings to life some legendary characters: Abe Ruef (boss), Enrico Caruso (tenor), Eugene Schmitz (the indicted mayor), and Alma Spreckels (tabloid celebrity). This “beautifully realized and brilliantly conceived” story of improbable alliances and outcomes takes hold right from the first page, with remarkable scenes of joy, devastation, and renewal. This celebrates the audacious fortitude of its young heroine, that discovers an unexpected strength during unprecedented times.

Even though this novel has a panoramic sweep, Carol’s novel “Vera” is a novel of great heart and immediacy. Right from the early scene at the opera, to its shocking correlative it exists in the zone of what we can call the world, and in so many ways it sings. The book is a triumph, a tale of healing and disaster, humility and power, grace and grit all set against the lascivious and lush backdrop of San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake.