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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher |
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ACT OF GOD
From the author of HEROIC MEASURES, a contemporary noir-novel that starts out as a comedy of errors and turns darker at every hairpin turn, about a lethal form of mold spreading throughout New York City, about the townhouse in which it is first discovered, and about the people living in it whose lives are suddenly upended.
New York City is sweltering from yet another record-breaking heat wave, this one accompanied by biblical rains. Edith, a recently retired legal librarian and her identical twin sister, Kat, a feckless romantic who has always mistaken eccentricity for originality, discover something ominous in their hall closet: a phosphorescent mushroom is sprouting from the wall.
Upstairs, their landlady, Vida Cebu, a Shakespearean actress far more famous for her commercials for Ziberax (the first female sexual enhancement pill) than for her stage work, discovers that a petite Russian girl, a runaway au pair, has been secretly living in her guest room closet. When the police arrest the intruder, a second glowing mushroom is found under her bedding, and the four women must evacuate the contaminated row house with only the clothes on their backs.
As the mold infestation spreads from row house to high-rise, and frightened New Yorkers wait out this plague on their city and property, the four women become caught up in a centrifugal nightmare. Before the last mushroom dies, one woman will be dead, and the others left to wonder: Was it an act of God?
Part horror story, part screwball comedy, Jill Ciment's brilliant suspense novel looks at what happens when our lives--so seemingly set and ordered, yet so precariously balanced--break down in the wake of calamity. A novel, as well, about love (familial and profound) and how it can appear in the most unlikely circumstances.
JILL CIMENT was born in Montreal, Canada. She is the author of four novels, The Tattoo Artist, Teeth of the Dog, The Law of Falling Bodies and Heroic Measures; a collection of short stories, Small Claims; and a memoir, Half a Life. Ciment is a professor of English at the University of Florida. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.
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Book
Published 2015-03-03 by Pantheon |