THE HALF LIFE

From the author of Florence Adler Swims Forever and The House Is on Fire, a novel set on Sardinia during the Atomic Age, about a navy wife forced to choose between her loyalty to her husband and her growing devotion to the island's Italian activists determined to see the American military presence gone.

When twenty-three-year-old Eileen O'Malley meets charismatic Navy lieutenant Paul Archer in a Charleston department store, she doesn't expect to fall hardor fast. But Paul is funny and ambitious, and soon, they're engaged and he's asking her to follow him to a remote naval base on La Maddalena, a rugged, sun-drenched Italian island in the middle of the Mediterranean.

What begins as a great adventure quickly becomes something more complicated. Life on La Maddalena is both exhilarating and disorienting: a makeshift military community where American wives drink Campari, trade gossip, and learn to make do, while the men patrol the depths of the sea.

But paradise has its cracks. Sardinian locals protest the American presence, rumors swirl about nuclear materials on the base, and a group of scientists Eileen meets through a local language class are asking unsettling questions about radiation exposure and environmental riskquestions the Navy seems eager to silence. As her marriage strains and her loyalties begin to shift, Eileen finds herself drawn into a web of secretsand to a local man who forces her to imagine a life beyond the one she's been handed.

Atmospheric, sexy, and quietly defiant, The Half Life is a story of love, complicity, and awakeningof one woman's reckoning with power and the price of staying silent.