Description: At once a moving love story, a dark comedy, a psychological thriller, and a deeply disturbing portrait of a fracturing mind, this highly inventive debut explores the mysterious nature of human relationships.
Brief description: Rivka Galchen received her MD from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, having spent a year in South America working on public health issues. Galchen completed her MFA at Columbia University, where she was a Robert Bingham Fellow. Her essay on the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics was published in The Believer, and she is the recipient of a 2006 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Galchen lives in New York City. She is the author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances.
Review Quotes:
"A relentless exploration of how a man could fail to see clearly the woman he loves . . . [A novel] that knows how to move from the comic to the painful . . . Galchen has a knack for taking a thread and fraying it, so that a sentence never quite ends up where you expect." --James Wood, The New Yorker
"At once mournful and playful . . . [a] droll, exquisite first novel." --Laura Miller, Salon.com "There are passages so achingly beautiful in Galchen's strange puzzle of a book--about love, resilience, and perception." --Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly (Grade A) "A dense, fractally complex first novel by the conspicuously talented Rivka Galchen." --Lev Grossman, Time "Galchen's dark and comical mystery is a clever take on the ways love, longing and overanalysis can drive you absolutely nuts." --Marie Claire "Genuinely suspenseful . . . Ms. Galchen is a writer to be watched." --The Economist