And If They Have Not Died — Lore Segal

New York Times Notable Book 2013

"No one writes like Segal -- her glittering intelligence, her piercing wit, and her dazzling insights into manners and mores, are a profound pleasure. From first to last I loved this wise and irreverent novel." -- Margot Livesey

"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

“Lore Segal is a marvelous and fearless writer.  No subject is too hard, too absurd, or too painful  for her wise, peculiar and brilliant fiction.” -- Lily Tuck

The renowned New Yorker writer and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lore Segal -- whom The New York Times declared "closer than anyone to writing the Great American Novel" -- 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.