TWIN STUDIES

Twin Studies by Keith Maillard is an engrossing, timely, and contemporary novel about the bonds between twins, about sexuality and gender fluidity, and about the messy complexities of modern family life.

Dr. Erica Bauer is a young university professor doing research on attachment between twins. She receives an email from a pair of twelve-year-old twins – Jamie and Devon – asking if they can be in her twin study; there's a suicide threat on the very first page of the email. Erica is also suicidal – her twin sister was killed in an automobile accident the year before – so the email strikes her at a deep emotional level. Risking her academic career, Erica becomes increasingly involved with them, setting out on a quest to understand these boy-girl fraternal twins who are convinced against all evidence that they are really “identical.” What is wrong with them? Are they genuinely suicidal? If so, how did they get that way?

The “twin” narrative voice belongs to Karen Oxley, Jamie and Devon's mother. She thinks of herself as a two-time trophy wife; she's living off proceeds of her two divorce settlements in a multimillion-dollar house in West Vancouver. A helicopter mom, Karen worries constantly about her four children and her sense that her own life is empty and meaningless. Reluctantly she is drawn into a complex chess game with her ex-husband, an American billionaire who is threatening to take Devon back to the United States. Jamie and Devon have told Karen that if they are separated, they will “automatically” commit suicide.

Erica is a small-town girl who has worked her way up the hard way to becoming an assistant professor in a major research university. Karen is a daughter of privilege raising her own privileged children. A friendship seems unlikely, but these two women are fascinated by each other and are drawn into their own
perplexing twin-like relationship.

Set in Vancouver, that most cosmopolitan of Canadian cities, Twin Studies expands to link these two women to the whole world – particularly to Asia (especially Japan), the American West, and Australia – as the exploration of twinship unfolds to reveal the universal human desire to find the perfect other, our psychic twin.

KEITH MAILLARD is a professor (and past Chair) in the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia. His body of work includes thirteen novels, one of which, Motet, won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Hazard Zones was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Literary Prize and Gloria was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award. The Clarinet Polka was awarded the Creative Arts Prize by the Polish American Historical Association. He lives in Vancouver.