The New York Times bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club
introduces a middle-class American family that is ordinary in every way
but one in this novel that won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist
for the Man Booker Prize.
Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and
Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. "I
was raised with a chimpanzee," she explains. "I tell you Fern was a
chimp and already you aren't thinking of her as my sister. But until
Fern's expulsion...she was my twin, my funhouse mirror, my whirlwind
other half and I loved her as a sister." As a child, Rosemary never
stopped talking. Then, something happened, and Rosemary wrapped herself
in silence.
In We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler weaves her
most accomplished work to date--a tale of loving but fallible people
whose well-intentioned actions lead to heartbreaking consequences.
"A gripping, big-hearted book...through the tender voice of her
protagonist, Fowler has a lot to say about family, memory, language,
science, and indeed the question of what constitutes a human
being."--Khaled Hosseini