Act of God

A brilliant comic suspense novel and perfect summer read Brooklyn, the summer of 2015. The city is sweltering from another record-breaking heatwave, accompanied by biblical rains, and now a mysteriously glowing mushroom infestation is threatening the city. As the HAZMAT squad descends, identical twin sisters Edith, a recently retired librarian, and Kat, a feckless romantic who mistakes her own eccentricity for originality, are evacuated from their terraced house alongside their landlady and a Russian interloper, caught in a centrifugal nightmare. And as the mould spreads from house to house, frightened and bewildered New Yorkers wonder whether this plague on all their houses is an act of God... Part horror story, part screwball comedy, Act of God>/em> considers what happens when our lives - so seemingly set and ordered yet so precariously balanced - break down in the wake of calamity. It is, also, a novel about love found in the most unlikely circumstances. The award-winning author Jill Ciment was born in Montreal, Canada. She is the author of Small Claims, a collection of short stories and novellas; the novels The Law of Falling Bodies, Teeth of the Dog, The Tattoo Artist and Heroic Measures; and a memoir, Half a Life. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and prizes, among them a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. Ciment shares her time between Florida and Brooklyn, and is a professor of creative writing at the University of Florida. Her novel Heroic Measures is also published by Pushkin Press.