“Ingenious, sensual, gleeful. . . . It demands of its readers only imagination, and rewards them with hilarity, terror, and marvels.”—Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn
Nora and Blanche are cojoined twins. Nora, the dominant twin, thirsts for love and adventure, while Blanche has been asleep for nearly 30 years. Determined to shed herself of her her sister’s dead weight, Nora leaves for London in search of the mysterious Unity Foundation, which promises to make two one.
But once Nora arrives in London, the past begins to surface, forcing her into a most reluctant voyage into memory—a search for meaning and understanding, that will push Nora to the brink of insanity. Grotesque, funny, and dazzlingly told, Shelley Jackson’s first novel is an imaginative and touching portrait of two lives in a cleft world yearning for wholeness.
Shelley Jackson is the author of the short story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, the hypertext novel Patchwork Girl, several children's books, and "Skin," a story published in tattoos on the skin of more than two thousand volunteers. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
What People are Saying About This
Kelly Link
“I loved this book. . . . Half Life is twisty and vampy and campy, grotesque, picaresque, droll, and dazzling.”
Jonathan Lethem
“Ingenious, sensual, gleeful. . . . It demands of its readers only imagination, and rewards them with hilarity, terror, and marvels.”
The alternate history is fertile ground in science fiction, the ultimate “what if” that lies at the core of all stories writ large. Most of them go big with their premises, latching onto history’s biggest villains and biggest moments and positing a simple tweak to events, then following the infinite threads it generates to their logical conclusions. And that’s all […]
