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Chris Bohjalian

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Chris Bohjalian

Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ Author


Born
in White Plains, New York, The United States
Website

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Member Since
November 2007


Chris Bohjalian is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 25 books. His 25th book, THE JACKAL’S MISTRESS, is now on sale. He writes literary fiction, historical fiction, thrillers, and (on occasion) ghost stories. His goal is never to write the same book twice. He has published somewhere in the neighborhood of 3.5 million words.

His work has been translated into 35 languages and become three movies (MIDWIVES, SECRETS OF EDEN, and PAST THE BLEACHERS) and an Emmy-winning TV series (THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT). He has two other novels in development for TV series as well.

He is also a playwright, including THE CLUB in 2024; MIDWIVES in 2020; and GROUNDED (now WINGSPAN) in 2018.

His books have been chosen as Best Books of the Year by the Washing
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Popular Answered Questions

Chris Bohjalian Okay, here are ten random suggesstions â€� the last a reference to the fact I was told by a creative writing professor when I was in college that I shou…m´Ç°ù±ðOkay, here are ten random suggesstions â€� the last a reference to the fact I was told by a creative writing professor when I was in college that I should become a banker.

1) Don’t merely write what you know. Write what you don’t know. It might be more difficult at first, but � unless you’ve just scaled Mount Everest or found a cure for all cancers � it will also be more interesting.

2) Do some research. Read the letters John Winthrop wrote to his wife, or the letters a Civil War private sent home to his family from Antietam, or the stories the metalworkers told of their experiences on the girders high in the air when they were building the Empire State Building. Good fiction is rich with minutiae � what people wore, how they cooked, how they filled the mattresses on which they slept � and often the details you discover will help you dramatically with your narrative.

3) Interview someone who knows something about your topic. Fiction may be a solitary business when you’re actually writing, but prior to sitting down with your computer (or pencil or pen), it often demands getting out into the real world and learning how (for instance) an ob-gyn spends her day, or what a lawyer does when he isn’t in the courtroom, or exactly what it feels like to a farmer to milk a cow when he’s been doing it for 35 years. Ask questions. . .and listen.

4) Interview someone else. Anyone else. Ask questions that are absolutely none of your business about their childhood, their marriage, their sex life. They don’t have to be interesting (though it helps). They don’t even have to be honest.

5) Read some fiction you wouldn’t normally read: A translation of a Czech novel, a mystery, a book you heard someone in authority dismiss as “genre fiction.�

6) Write for a day without quote marks. It will encourage you to see the conversation differently, and help you to hear in your head more precisely what people are saying and thereby create dialogue that sounds more realistic. You may even decide you don’t need quote marks in the finished story.

7) Skim the thesaurus, flip through the dictionary. Find new words and words you use rarely � lurch, churn, disconsolate, effulgent, intimations, sepulchral, percolate, pallid, reproach � and use them in sentences.

8) Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine. . .and then make them plausible.

9) Write one terrific sentence. Don’t worry about anything else � not where the story is going, not where it should end. Don’t pressure yourself to write 500 or 1,000 words this morning. Just write 10 or 15 ones that are very, very sound.

10) Pretend you’re a banker, but you write in the night to prove to some writing professor that she was wrong, wrong, wrong. Allow yourself a small dram of righteous anger.(less)
Chris Bohjalian That's a wonderful question -- and in my case easy to answer.

I am a descendant of two survivors of the Armenian Genocide: my grandparents. Like so ma…m´Ç°ù±ð
That's a wonderful question -- and in my case easy to answer.

I am a descendant of two survivors of the Armenian Genocide: my grandparents. Like so many survivors, they took most of their stories to their graves. Oh, we know bits and pieces. But there are great, gaping holes in the narrative because some elements were, apparently, too painful to share.

For instance, my grandfather had three brothers -- and we know nothing about what happened to them. Likewise, we have almost no specifics about how my grandmother and her mother survived after her father was executed by Ottoman soldiers and their horse farm and home were confiscated.

Certainly that idea of "mystery" was integral in the tone of my novel, "The Sandcastle Girls."

But there might be one more book to write about that part of my family history. We'll see.

Thanks for asking.

(less)
Average rating: 3.75 · 646,240 ratings · 62,707 reviews · 40 distinct works â€� Similar authors
Midwives

really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 161,588 ratings — published 1997 — 52 editions
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The Flight Attendant

3.53 avg rating — 89,685 ratings — published 2018 — 29 editions
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Hour of the Witch

3.84 avg rating — 48,067 ratings — published 2021 — 17 editions
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The Sandcastle Girls

3.89 avg rating — 41,885 ratings — published 2012 — 47 editions
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The Guest Room

3.70 avg rating — 32,810 ratings — published 2016 — 22 editions
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The Double Bind

3.64 avg rating — 30,116 ratings — published 2007 — 47 editions
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The Light in the Ruins

3.68 avg rating — 29,709 ratings — published 2013 — 19 editions
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Skeletons at the Feast

really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 26,639 ratings — published 2008 — 35 editions
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The Lioness

3.72 avg rating — 24,246 ratings — published 2022 — 14 editions
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The Sleepwalker

3.68 avg rating — 21,454 ratings — published 2017 — 21 editions
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More books by Chris Bohjalian…

Pulling Prose from Our Dreams

26 March 2025

Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who Are Friends,

I’m writing a novel that is, at least in part, about my childhood and adolescence, memories of which seem to be peppering my sleep.

And so lately I’ve been trying to understand my dreams.

A novel about dreams may sound like a yawn, but at the moment I’m finding it eye-opening.

I’ve also been reading a bit of Freud and a bit of Jung, but a Read more of this blog post »
 •  0 comments  •  flag
Published on March 26, 2025 13:20

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The Wedding People
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Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley
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Super fun novel. Reminiscent in all the best ways of TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW. Millennials in the first decade of the 21st century falling in and out of love, writing (and performing) music, and having VERY strong opinions about pop and roc ...more
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Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley
Deep Cuts
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Super fun novel. Reminiscent in all the best ways of TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW. Millennials in the first decade of the 21st century falling in and out of love, writing (and performing) music, and having VERY strong opinions about pop and roc ...more
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CULTISH is among the smartest, moist astute, and (sometimes) funniest books I have read lately. Amanda Montell brilliantly walks us through the language of cults, her research thorough and thought-provoking, and makes us realize that the very word "c ...more
Chris answered Lori Orr-Chavez's question: Chris Bohjalian
I've only written two ghost stories -- Hangman and The Night Strangers -- and so I'm not expert on what makes a good one. My favorite ghost story is likely Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, and I think what makes it so terrifying (and mov See Full Answer
Chris liked a quote
The Jackal's Mistress by Chris Bohjalian
“The French gave it that name because it was the bullet you saved for yourself when all hope was gone. The last bullet. Death with dignity. This was the bullet that would do for you the things your wife never would: that's why they called it the mistress bullet.�
...more
Chris Bohjalian
Chris and 23 other people liked Debbie's review of The Jackal's Mistress:
The Jackal's Mistress by Chris Bohjalian
"Once again, Chris Bohjalian has written a gripping and compassionate novel that will keep readers glued to their seats. Having read sixteen of this author's books, I think that this is one of his best.

Inspired by the story of real people in history " Read more of this review »
The Jackal's Mistress by Chris Bohjalian
"It is 1864 in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Twenty-four-year-old Libby Steadman's husband, Peter, is a Confederate soldier who was captured and sent to a Union prison. Once his letters stopped coming, Libby accepted the strong possibility that Peter " Read more of this review »
Chris and 74 other people liked Debra's review of The Jackal's Mistress:
The Jackal's Mistress by Chris Bohjalian
"Gripping, wonderfully written, well thought out, and hard to put down, Chris Bohjalian delivered a powerful and moving book with The Jackal's Mistress. I loved the writing, the vivid descriptions, the characters, the tension, and the dread. This book" Read more of this review »
Chris rated a book it was amazing
Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall
Broken Country
by Clare Leslie Hall (Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ Author)
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An absolute banger of a book. Claire Leslie Hall moves between 1968 and the late 1950s in the Dorset countryside, tracing the love story between Beth and Gabriel, a farmer's daughter and a young Martin Amis-esque novelist just before his career takes ...more
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Quotes by Chris Bohjalian  (?)
Quotes are added by the Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ community and are not verified by Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ.

“Food is a gift and should be treated reverentially--romanced and ritualized and seasoned with memory.”
Chris Bohjalian, Secrets of Eden
tags: food

“We may talk a good game and write even better ones, but we never outgrow those small wounded things we were when we were five and six and seven.”
Chris Bohjalian, Secrets of Eden

“But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?”
Chris Bohjalian, The Sandcastle Girls

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“And though some days it is very hard, I try not to live for the future. And I try not to dream of the past.”
Chris Bohjalian, The Law of Similars

“As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagination for humans to identify with animal suffering than it did to conceive of space flight or cloning or nuclear fusion. Yes, she was a fanatic in the eyes of most of the country. . .Mostly, however, she just lacked patience for people who wouldn't accept her belief that humans inflicted needless agony on the animals around them, and they did so in numbers that were absolutely staggering.”
Chris Bohjalian, Before You Know Kindness

“Though angels were easy to finds in cemeteries, she said that she didn't especially care for funereal angels and tombstone cherubs -- she wanted her angels among the living, not watching over the already dead -- and thus she scoured parks and gardens for the angels with whom, on some level, she wanted to commune.”
Chris Bohjalian, Secrets of Eden

“Sara knew that behind its locked front door no home was routine. Not the house of her childhood, not the apartment of her husband's. not the world they were building together with Willow and Patrick. All households had their mysteries, their particular forms of dysfunction.”
Chris Bohjalian, Before You Know Kindness

“He moved quickly away from her through the ring, his whole body starting forward with the big animal in two-point and then -- the horse's legs extended before and behind her, a carousel pony but real, the immense thrust invisible to anyone but the boy on the creature's back -- he was rising, rising, rising. . .
And aloft.”
Chris Bohjalian, The Buffalo Soldier

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Comments (showing 1-17)    post a comment »
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message 17: by Nita

Nita What an honor it is to be your friend on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ. I love your books, and I am looking forward to reading "The Guest Room."
I have been following your writing for years, and you are one of my very favorite authors.


message 16: by Phyllis

Phyllis I started reading your books with Midwives and have read everything I could get my hands on since. To list my favorites would not be a very exclusive list, but my favorite of favorites is Skeletons at the Feast. I just discovered Trans-Sister Radio, and was, once again, blown away by your extraordinary talent.
When are you coming to Nashville again? When I was at Parnassus Books recently, I made a special request for you to come to Salon@615. They pointed out that you had been here before (which I missed out of ignorance), but might come again with your next book. So, write fast!
And, thank you for all the pleasant hours of reading you have given us.


Jennifer Dear Mr Bohjalian,
I just wanted to tell you that I love reading your work. The Double Bind rocked me back on my (mental) heels. Skeletons at the Feast kicked off what would grow to be morbid fascination/disgust/rabid researching of the Holocaust, which had previously been just a small history fact gleaned from a required class in high school.
I just finished The Sandcastle Girls. I note the day I start and finish each book (because I eventually log them on goodreads, you see), and didn't realize until I read your author's note that the day I had begun reading said book on April 24, 2015, coincided with the Armenian genocide's centennial.
I don't believe in coincidences, so do with that what you will.
Thank you for taking the time to read my message, and thank you even more for diligently sharing the fruits of your craft with us readers.
Sincerely,
Jennifer Engh


message 14: by Lisa

Lisa See Chris, How fun to see you here. I'm not terribly active on GoodReads, but I try to stay a bit connected.


message 13: by Sam

Sam Chris,
I sooo wanted to see you when you come to Minneapolis July 12 but I checked with the bookstore and I can't afford the cost of the lunch etc. I hope you come again sometime when I'm more able to swing it. I really would love to meet you.


message 12: by Karen

Karen I had a dream the other night that you were doing a reading at the Taco Bell in Janesville, WI. Please don't take this as an insult. I think I just so want to go to one of your readings my mind created one. However, if you should want to come to WI I will be the first in line.


message 11: by Chris

Chris Dan wrote: "Chris
i am almost finished reading the electronic edition advance of LIGHT IN THE RUINS. Once again an example of your masterful storytelling. I love the separation of timelines and the added narra..."


Thanks so much, Dan. I really appreciate your kind words.

Looking forward to seeing you three weeks and three hours from right now!


message 10: by Dan

Dan Radovich Chris
i am almost finished reading the electronic edition advance of LIGHT IN THE RUINS. Once again an example of your masterful storytelling. I love the separation of timelines and the added narrative from the killer, a good touch. The scenes in Florence bring back memories from my trip there, even the smell of the Arno; you make me long to go back.


message 9: by Edik

Edik Baghoumian IT IS MY VERY DISTINCT PLEASURE BECOMING YOUR FRIEND INDEED APPRECIATED !!! WISHING YOU MUCH SUCCESS & HAPPINESS BUT ABOVE ALL GOOD HEALTH !!!
Your True Friend

Edik


message 8: by Chris

Chris Thanks, Susan!


message 7: by Susan

Susan Chris because, I saw your recommendation of Baker's Daughter, reading and loving, and savoring every page.


Sandra Theresa wrote: "Just wanted to say I am a big fan! Hangman was one of the scariest and most suspenseful books I've ever read! Water Witches was a great one too. I own them all and as soon as I finish the book I..."

Theresa, I found Hangman to be scary too, and I thought I had gotten to the point that things in books couldn't scare me anymore! I loved The Double Bind! I liked it even more than Secrets of Eden, & I thought it was great too!


message 5: by Matt

Matt Hoping you can make it to Nonesuch for your new book tour! Would be a huge success :D


message 4: by Matt

Matt It was wonderful meeting you yesterday here at Nonesuch! Lots of people saw your interview on '207' and have come in to buy your books.

Excited to have you here for your next release! We've got a pretty literary crowd - in fact, when you were here, one woman recognized you and was pretty starstruck! She came in again today and was gushing. haha.

Anyway, hope you're well and best of luck with your writing/touring! Enjoy your time at home (assuming you've finished the tour!)

Best,
Matty


message 3: by Keely

Keely Thanks so much for the friendship! I'm such a fan!


Eva-Marie Nevarez I was so happy to find you on here! I just got Midwives and can't wait to start- it looks great! Thanks for everything you do!


message 1: by Theresa (last edited Aug 25, 2016 02:04PM)

Theresa Just wanted to say I am a big fan! Hangman was one of the scariest and most suspenseful books I've ever read! Water Witches was a great one too. I own them all and as soon as I finish the book I'm currently reading I'll start The Double Bind. I actually chose it for my bookclub pick, I am excited to see what everyone thinks of it.


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