Gian Sardar Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Gian Sardar
Gian Sardar studied creative writing at Loyola Marymount University. Gian lives in Los Angeles, which is the city she was born in but she has also lived in Minnesota and Colorado, two states that are huge in her heart. Gian’s mom is from Minnesota while her dad is from Kurdistan.

She lives with her son, husband, and an insane dog. She is obsessed with football, reading, any form of procrastination, gardening, and baking.

Gian has been intrigued by the subject of past lives. From dreams that she has had to inexplicable connections places and people, and is something that she finally explored during a series of past life regressions. The book was born from one of these sessions, not just in the subject matter but also in the fact that she incorporated a scene that she got to see that day.

She has always been fascinated by the idea that some of our inexplicable loves, fears, or interests could stretch back much further than we even consciously remember, on back to our past lives. It might all be coincidence, or maybe not. Maybe there is a good reason that you feel as though you already know somebody that you just met, or a reason that you continue to dream of the same exact world, but it just isn’t your own.

This is an idea that she explores in her first novel, “You Were Here” (released in 2017), one that she also plays with the dramatic tension that is created when the reader knows more than her characters.

Gian has enjoyed writing from a very young age and when she was a kid wrote “novels” (little stories in hardcovers, which she is pretty sure she just figured the hardcovers meant they were in fact novels). But it was not until she was in college that she realize that writing was something that she took seriously and was interested in pursuing. For her, being a writer didn’t have anything to do with being published, it was only something she was because she had written. She figures that if somebody writes, that makes them a writer. And if you can’t NOT write, then you are truly a writer.

She gets inspired to write by reading some of her favorite authors. Writers like James Salter, Lauren Groff, and Anthony Doerr, as well as others. She is unable to read a few of their pages without wanting to hurry on back to her computer and begin writing.

If Gian gets stuck on something while writing, she gets up and does anything else: cooking, taking a shower, and going for a walk, whatever she has to. Sometimes your focus gets so narrow as you attempt to come up with precisely what you need that you do not leave room for inspiration, and let go in order to allow in.

Her work has appeared places like Confrontation Magazine, the New York Times, and on Salon.com, among some other places.

“You Were Here” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 2017. What if the past never gets buried? Death, both early and accidental, has always been something that Abby Walters has been preoccupied with. Now she is thirty-three and yearning to settle down with her commitment shy boyfriend. A recurring dream from her past comes back: a paralyzing nightmare of getting buried alive, with the taste of dirt in her mouth being real and cloying. However this time the dream reveals one name out of her family’s past.

Looking for some answers, she goes back home to small-town Minnesota for the very first time in fourteen years, where she reconnects with her crush from high school, who is now a police detective on a violent criminal’s trail. When Abby tries on her grandma’s mesmerizing diamond ring, a ring that she always dreamed would be hers, she finds a cryptic note that has been long hidden under the box’s velvet lining.

What secret could her grandma have been hiding? And could this be the key to what has been haunting Abby? While she starts to uncover the traces of the love triangle which went shockingly wrong almost seventy years prior, we, also, see that the layers of our lives might echo a past that we have never known. This novel, with its long buried secret which might finally be revealed and some excellent plot twists, weaves two worlds separated by decades. It asks if the mistakes made in past lives can ever be corrected in the future, and if some souls are just meant to find one another again and again.

“Take What You Can Carry” is the second stand alone novel and was released in the year 2021. An aspiring photographer follows her own dreams and she faces her fears in a novel about finding promise, beauty, and love amid all the chaos of war-torn Kurdistan.

The year is 1979. Olivia Murray, who is a secretary at a Los Angeles newspaper, is determined to become a photojournalist and actually make a difference with her work. When a chance opens up, she jumps on it, accompanying Delan, her Kurdish boyfriend, to northern Iraq to attend a family wedding, hoping she can capture an image that gets her a job in the photo department.

More important than that, however, the trip is an opportunity to understand Delan’s childhood and bridge the differences of their personal pasts. But when the return trip back home proves to be less safe than Delan believed, she is confronted with a reality that she hadn’t expected, and gets awakened to the dangers of a town that is patrolled by Iraqi military under constant threat and under curfew.

However in this world ripped apart by war, there are some intoxicating scents and sights, innocence that isn’t yet compromised, Delan’s loving family, and some tiny acts of kindness which flourish unexpectedly. It all will be tested when Olivia captures this one tragic and shattering moment on film. One which upends each of their lives and proves that real bravery starts with an open heart.