A
New York Times
Notable Book
The renowned
New Yorker
writer and Pulitzer Prize finalist delivers a hilarious, poignant, and profoundly moving tale of living, loving, and aging in America today
At Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, doctors have noticed a marked uptick in Alzheimer’s patients. People who seemed perfectly lucid just a day earlier suddenly show signs of advanced dementia. Is it just normal aging, or an epidemic? Is it a coincidence, or a secret terrorist plot?
In the looking-glass world of
Half the Kingdom—
where terrorist paranoia and end-of-the-world hysteria mask deeper fears of mortality; where parents’ and their grown children's feelings vacillate between frustration and tenderness; and where the broken medical system leads one character to quip, “Kafka wrote slice-of-life fiction”—all is familiar and yet slightly askew.
Lore Segal masterfully interweaves her characters’ lives—lives that, for good or for ill, all converge in Cedar's ER—into a funny, tragic, and tender portrait of how we live today.
“Lore Segal may have come closer than anyone to writing The Great American Novel.”
—
The New York Times
“I always feel in her work such a sense of toughness and humor . . . Her writing is sad and funny, and that makes it more of both.”
—Jennifer Egan, author of
A Visit from the Goon Squad