Welcome!

I’m Carolyn Turgeon, and I’m the author of five novels—

Rain Village, Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story, Mermaid, The Fairest of Them All, and The Next Full Moon, most of them based on old-time fairy tales, dark and glimmering—and, more recently, The Faerie Handbook, which came out from HarperCollins in 2017 and might be the loveliest book printed this century, and the equally curvaceous The Mermaid Handbook, which came out in 2018. The Unicorn Handbook made its ravishing debut in 2020, and I’m currently working on a new novel that might change your life.

I’m also the editor-in-chief/part owner of Enchanted Living, a quarterly print publication about which the NY Times said, "It's as though Martha Stewart Living and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene had a magazine baby.” You can learn about the magazine here, or subscribe here. Recent themes have included the Pre-Raphaelites and Practical Magic, and recent covers featured a flame-haired lady knight lying in a field of belladonna and a recreation of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix.

I love travel and adventure and have attended mermaid camp at Weeki Wachee (where I swam in a tail with glamorous mermaids and a wild manatee) and was scuba certified in Corn Island, Nicaragua, by a dive instructor from Spain, then dove with sharks in the Bahamas. I occasionally attend witch camp in New Orleans. I’ve visited Italy numerous times to research a new novel (and was in a PhD program at UCLA way back when, studying medieval Italian poetry) and, for research purposes, visited a count’s private archives in the same Florence library where Hannibal Lecter worked on the Thomas Harris books. That is how dedicated I am to my art.

Mostly, though, I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, with a giant rescue labradoodle named Iggy. If you’d like to subscribe to my newsletter, I might send you a missive now and then. I’d love to hear from you.

Love,

Carolyn

Books by Carolyn