Half the Kingdom

A New York Times Notable Book

The renowned New Yorker writer and Pulitzer Prize finalist delivers a hilarious, poignant, and profoundly moving tale of living, loving, and aging in America today

At Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, doctors have noticed a marked uptick in Alzheimer’s patients. People who seemed perfectly lucid just a day earlier suddenly show signs of advanced dementia. Is it just normal aging, or an epidemic? Is it a coincidence, or a secret terrorist plot?

In the looking-glass world of Half the Kingdom—where terrorist paranoia and end-of-the-world hysteria mask deeper fears of mortality; where parents’ and their grown children’s feelings vacillate between frustration and tenderness; and where the broken medical system leads one character to quip, “Kafka wrote slice-of-life fiction”—all is familiar and yet slightly askew.

Lore Segal masterfully interweaves her characters’ lives—lives that, for good or for ill, all converge in Cedar’s ER—into a funny, tragic, and tender portrait of how we live today.

“Lore Segal may have come closer than anyone to writing The Great American Novel.” —The New York Times
 
“I always feel in her work such a sense of toughness and humor . . . Her writing is sad and funny, and that makes it more of both.” —Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad