Half The Kingdom - Hardcover

"There's so much going on within the pages of this deceptively tricksy novella, it calls for an immediate re-read." --The Independent

"Half the Kingdom investigates the lacunae and surrealism of the memory loss that comes with old age...the writer weaves a frayed tapestry of recollection against the bureaucratic background of the U.S. hospital system. Protagonists are locked in narrative quadrilles, twirling with helplessness and fear, elevated by folklore's black humour." --Guernica Magazine

"It seems many of us prefer to avoid contemplating old age until we suddenly arrive there, but this remarkable novel leads us deftly into the heart of that twilight kingdom." --Daily Telegraph

'Both funny and astute, a dialogue-driven novel about a group of loving but egotistical people who seem daunted by the ceaseless passage of time and alienated by their highly individualized, technology-driven world. [Segal's] guiding voice is precise and unsentimental, bringing readers closer to the mentally ill with a skilful combination of vivid language and purposefully disordered clauses.' --The Times Literary Supplement

"Half the Kingdom investigates the lacunae and surrealism of the memory loss that comes with old age...the writer weaves a frayed tapestry of recollection against the bureaucratic background of the U.S. hospital system. Protagonists are locked in narrative quadrilles, twirling with helplessness and fear, elevated by folklore's black humour." --Guernica Magazine

"It seems many of us prefer to avoid contemplating old age until we suddenly arrive there, but this remarkable novel leads us deftly into the heart of that twilight kingdom." --Daily Telegraph

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.