Narine Abgaryan Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Narine Abgaryan is a Russian blogger and author with Armenian roots.

The author was born in the Armenian town of Berd in 1971 to a family of a school teacher and a doctor. She was the eldest of five kids and for many years, they grew up under the many traditions of Armenia.
Her paternal grandfather was born and lived for much of his life in Western Armenia while her mother came from the Eastern Armenian region of Karabakh.

While she was born in Armenia, she has now been living with her husband and her son in Moscow for more than three decades.

Going back to her childhood, Narine Abgaryan went to high school in Berd, Armenia, where she loved music and hence specialized in the piano.

Upon graduating from high school, she went to Yerevan Brusov State University and four years later, she had her Russian Literature and Language Teachers diploma.
Nadine published “Three Apples from the Sky,” her debut work of fiction in 2020 and now has at least half a dozen works of fiction to her name.

Her Manyunya trilogy which features a troublesome and busy 11-year-old living in Berd has to be her most popular series.

Semyon Andreich her children’s fiction work was the winner of the 2013 Best Children’s Book of the Decade New Literature Prize.

Apart from her written works, Nadine also edits a couple of anthologies of modern Russian literary fiction.

Given the popularity of her novels, they have been translated into more than a dozen languages. But it was when she got published in English that she achieved much of her success.

As for how she started, Narine Abgaryan has said that she started out penning stories in LiveJournal.

She used to pen stories about Manyunya, a young girl which came to the attention of Lara Gall who contacted her and introduced her to an editor at a major publishing house.

It was that story that she penned on LiveJournal that would then go on to win the Russian national literary award for Manuscript of the Year. She would later go on to make that story into a trilogy.

Over the years, she has become a feted author and in 2015 she was the winner of the Alexander Grin Literature Award alongside one other laureate, in recognition of her generous contribution to the development of literature.

In 2020, Oneworld Publications bought the English rights to her novel “Three Apples Fell From the Sky,” which Lisa C. Hayden then translated into English. It has become a very popular work that has been staged at various theaters in Russia.
The Manyunya trilogy is also in the process of being adapted into an animated film by Sarik Andreasyan.

“Three Apples Fell from the Sky” is a riveting work of fiction set in Russia in the village of Maran.

This had been a bustling village of two to three thousand residents before a landslide and earthquake destroyed homes and killed many of the citizens.

They had then been struck by a terrible drought that resulted in a famine only for a terrible winter to set in that also killed many people.

Even before the start of the Second World War, they lost a lot of men, and following that most of the young people left Maran to go find a better life abroad.

At present, only a few old men and women are left still telling old stories, following the old ways, and ensuring the others are safe. You get to know the grizzled residents of Maran and the more you interact with them, the more you will love them.
Despite many challenges, they kept going, and even for the least hopeful among them, they learned that miracles still exist in their godforsaken world.

Infused with elements of magical realism it is a work with quiet power and beauty that will transport you into a world long gone.

Narine Abgaryan’s novel “Simon” tells about a century of Armenian history. All this is seen through the perspective of women who make their home in a small mountain town.

In a very small town in the country of Armenia Simon, a common bricklayer dies having lived a long life in which he had a reputation for many love affairs but still commanded a lot of respect.
All the women he had been involved with came to his funeral.

There is his first love Susanna who had a very dark childhood and then Elixa a tender and modest woman who had been betrayed by her husband.

There is Silvia who once upon a time had been banished to a mental hospital and blocked from seeing her child and then Sofia a woman who is full of life and frivolous but has lost far too many pregnancies.
Simons charming love completely changed their lives and for the years they had been together they felt the spark of life that only he could provide.

The biographies of these women show how close they came to the edge on the verge of dementia and suicide only to be saved by Simon. Ultimately, Susanna, Silvia, Sofia, and Eliza gather at Simon’s coffin as his death reconciles them all.

Narine Abgaryan’s novel “People Who Are Always With Me” is a work set in Berd the Armenian town, where the author introduces you to several generations of the same family.

Jumping between the different timelines, he covers the whole palette of revelations, characters, and events. In this community, ancestral memories are held by women.

From the grandmas who are only about seeing their granddaughters married and happy in their families to the mothers who fake a smile and sometimes sigh, to the young woman who hears the cries of her mother every night and gives her hugs to comfort her.
The stories are all intertwined even though every woman has a uniqueness to her story. Nonetheless, they all live in a universe in which there is a little bit of everything from boundless love, tears, dreams, smiles, hopes, and reproaches.