An international bestseller, now available in this twentieth-anniversary revised edition with an introduction by the author, Rise the Euphrates reaches back to 1915 Armenia when nine-year-old Casard watches the Turks slaughter her family and hundreds of other Armenians. On a death march through the desert to the Euphrates River, the child witnesses her mother’s death and experiences a betrayal so profound that she forgets her name.
Casard emigrates to America and puts the unspeakable past behind her; yet as the years pass, she infuses her only daughter, Araxie, with a legacy of anger and shame. Araxie willfully marries outside the clan, making her husband and their children odar—outsiders. It falls to the next generation, Casard’s granddaughter, to heal the family. Seta Loon, the novel’s lyrical narrator, is the one upon whom both mother and grandmother pin their pain and hope, their regrets and dreams. “The daughter assumes what is unfinished in her mother’s life,” Seta learns. “The unanswered questions become her work.” Caught between the generations, between American and Armenian cultures in her Connecticut town, Seta confronts an even fiercer division: the one within herself. Seta’s remarkable song, and the wisdom she gains that frees the next generation and restores dignity and meaning to her family’s past, are Carol Edgarian’s stunningly original and groundbreaking triumph in Rise the Euphrates.
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On Genocide and Remembering
An excerpt from Rise the Euphrates, marking the centennial of the Armenian Genocide. Read in Narrative Magazine.
Praise for Rise the Euphrates
“This is a book whose generosity of spirit, intelligence, humanity and finally ambition are what literature ought to be and rarely is today—daring, heartbreaking and affirmative, giving order and sense to our random lives.”
“Vivid, chilling... Rise the Euphrates’ richly drawn characters and the haunted voice of the narrator will long remain in readers’ memories.”
“The writing is so good it can raise the hairs on your neck.”
“Few first novels are as deeply felt, yet so clearly communicative, as this one. It touches universals while powerfully evoking the everyday world in which we cope within our families with past, present and future. ... Edgarian’s novel has literary award written on every page.”
“Where is Armenia today? ... One could almost say that Armenia persists in Carol Edgarian’s prose.”
“At last, the book we’ve been waiting for—heart mending, redemptive and impossible to put down.”
“Carol Edgarian’s first novel is a real lemon—but not in the used-car sense. The book is spine-tingingly sour, delicious but painful, startlingly good and remembered long afterward.”
“Deeply affecting.... highly accomplished. An unusually intelligent look at the American immigrant experience.”
“Edgarian’s sumptuous writing and uncommon wisdom about the human spirit and its maiming seep into a reader’s heart, refusing to leave. This is a stunning debut, a book that will doubtless haunt its readers as it beguiles them.”
“ A novel of extraordinary compassion, it’s also a dead-on view of assimilation and the American experience.”
“How often do you get to read a book that captures you so entirely and deeply that it controls your days, measures them out, and defines them by how long it will be before you can get to your next night’s reading? Rise the Euphrates is one of these rare treasures: a work of power, grace, beauty, and exquisite tenderness. This book goes beyond the reading experience; it reminds you of your own hopes and terrors. Rise the Euphrates will live for a long, long time, in the manner of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“To the list of well-wrought generational sagas—John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Alex Haley’s Roots and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club—add [Carol Edgarian’s] powerful first novel, Rise the Euphrates.”
“Rise the Euphrates is a powerful, haunting novel that lingers in the imagination. It is a story of victims and betrayers, fear and yearning, and the family ties that bind us. ... Edgarian’s writing is masterful.”
“A valuable addition to American immigrant literature.”
“Powerful. ... Rise the Euphrates tells universal truths about mother-daughter relationships.”
