Life Sciences

Author:   Joy Sorman ,  Lara Vergnaud ,  Catherine Lacey
Publisher:   Restless Books
ISBN:  

9781632062956


Pages:   272
Publication Date:   25 November 2021
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   In stock   Availability explained
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Life Sciences


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Overview

An inventive coming-of-age novel from acclaimed French novelist Joy Sorman, Life Sciences boldly investigates the female condition, bodily autonomy, and the failings of modern medicine as one young woman confronts a centuries-old, matrilineal curse. Ninon Moise is cursed. So is her mother Esther, as was every eldest female member of her family going back to the Middle Ages. Each generation is marked by a uniquely obscure disease, illness, or ailment—one of her ancestors was patient zero in the sixteenth-century dancing plague of Strasbourg, while Esther has a degenerative eye disease. Ninon grows up comforted and fascinated by the recitation of these bizarre, inexplicable medical mysteries, forewarned that something will happen to her, yet entirely unprepared for how it will alter her life. Her own entry into this litany of maladies appears one morning in the form of an excruciating burning sensation on her skin, from her wrists to her shoulders. Embarking on a dizzying and frustrating cycle of doctors, specialists, procedures, needles, scans, and therapists, seventeen-year-old Ninon becomes consumed by her need to receive a diagnosis and find a cure for her ailment. She seeks to break the curse and reclaim her body by any means necessary, through increasing isolation and failed treatment after failed treatment, even as her life falls apart. A provocative and empathic questioning of illness, remedy, transmission, and health, Life Sciences poignantly questions our reliance upon science, despite its limitations, to provide all the answers. 'Translated by Lara Vergnaud into prose that is both deceptively simple and playfully archaic, Sorman’s story [is] among the first to tackle illness as metaphor, as birthright and as feminist rebellion…. Sorman’s alternative history of female malady offers both a horrific dose of truth and a comforting alternative to the stories sick women have told ourselves since time began.' — Lena Dunham, The New York Times Book Review

Full Product Details

Author:   Joy Sorman ,  Lara Vergnaud ,  Catherine Lacey
Publisher:   Restless Books
Imprint:   Restless Books
ISBN:  

9781632062956


ISBN 10:   163206295
Pages:   272
Publication Date:   25 November 2021
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In stock   Availability explained
We have confirmation that this item is in stock with the supplier. It will be ordered in for you and dispatched immediately.

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Reviews

It's an often dark tale about women who struggle with health issues that the medical establishment cannot-or does not want to-cure, or even identify. But stories can be changed, and Ninon might just be the woman to do it. Life Sciences is an immersive, harrowing novel about the power of stories to turn a captivating fable into a prophecy. -Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews


It's an often dark tale about women who struggle with health issues that the medical establishment cannot-or does not want to-cure, or even identify. But stories can be changed, and Ninon might just be the woman to do it. Life Sciences is an immersive, harrowing novel about the power of stories to turn a captivating fable into a prophecy. -Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews When a French teenager inherits a painful curse, ordinary life ends and a quest for healing begins.... The second novel from Sorman, a prizewinning novelist based in Paris, comes to us in a beautiful translation by Vergnaud.... [T]he ending is worth getting to. -Kirkus Reviews An arresting allegory.... [Ninon's] determination to jump 'out of the line of cursed, mad, degenerate women' makes her an engaging character as well as a powerful cipher of resistance to the stories she's grown up with.... Readers will feel empowered by this tale of taking control of one's body. -Publishers Weekly Sorman uses her protagonist's suffering to critique the medical establishment, with its massive imbalance of power between doctor and patient.... Life Sciences is a lonely book-and, for that reason, an effective one.... It forces the reader to reckon with what Ninon is going through. -Lily Meyer, NPR


It's an often dark tale about women who struggle with health issues that the medical establishment cannot-or does not want to-cure, or even identify. But stories can be changed, and Ninon might just be the woman to do it. Life Sciences is an immersive, harrowing novel about the power of stories to turn a captivating fable into a prophecy. -Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews When a French teenager inherits a painful curse, ordinary life ends and a quest for healing begins.... The second novel from Sorman, a prizewinning novelist based in Paris, comes to us in a beautiful translation by Vergnaud.... [T]he ending is worth getting to. -Kirkus Reviews An arresting allegory.... [Ninon's] determination to jump 'out of the line of cursed, mad, degenerate women' makes her an engaging character as well as a powerful cipher of resistance to the stories she's grown up with.... Readers will feel empowered by this tale of taking control of one's body. -Publishers Weekly


Author Information

Joy Sorman is a novelist and documentarian based in Paris.Her first novel, Boys, boys, boys, was awarded the 2005 Prix de Flore. In 2013, she received the Prix François Mauriac from the Académie française for Comme une bête. Life Sciences is her first novel to be translated into English. Lara Vergnaud is a literary translator from the French. She is the recipient of the 2019 French Voices Grand Prize and two PEN/Heim Translation Grants, and was a finalist for the 2019 Best Translated Book Award. Her forthcoming translations include works by Mohamed Leftah and Franck Bouysse. She currently lives in Washington, D.C. Catherine Lacey is the author of four works of fiction: Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Certain American States, and Pew. She's recently published work in The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Believer. Her books have been translated into several languages​.

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