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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without glutenberg?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt. This is Bookworm. Today, my guest is Carol

Edgarian. Vera is her third novel. We spoke to her last when her first novel, Rise

the Euphrates, came out. There was a second called Three Stages of Amazement. And tell me, Carol,

this book is set in 1906 in and around San Francisco at the time of the

1906 earthquake, which was followed by fires that burned down 500 city blocks.

How do you do research about parts of a city that no longer exist?

Well, it's interesting.

There was so much by way of photographs and firsthand accounts and certainly reporting.

I read the original newspapers.

But it was the photographs and the firsthand accounts that really gave me the greatest,

the greatest amount of fodder. And I'm reading not just for facts, of course. I'm also

reading for the sensory detail. How did it smell? How did it sound? How moment to moment to moment did it look? Did it feel?

And, you know, when I'm researching, I get so deep, I go so far down rabbit holes.

And I don't know what's going to stick. I might come across a little fragment of something that ultimately

becomes the seed of a whole scene or a whole through line in the book. Vera is the daughter

of a prostitute.

She runs the most exotic, the most exquisite house of prostitution in San Francisco at the time.

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