The Effect Of Living Backwards - Softcover

The smartest and most challenging book I've read by anyone our age ... it's just plain hard to put down (Dave Eggars)

A story that is savage and funny. The book is improbable, sure, but so wildly inventive that you hardly care (New York Times Book Review)

Whip-smart, weird, and dangerously readable ... [a] beautiful monster of a book .... Remember when fiction was supposed to be this much fun? (The Village Voice)

Julavits is an energetic, playful writer, and one can imagine she crafted The Effect of Living Backwards for repeated reading, with each read through revealing new Nabokovian tricks and riddles (San Francisco Chronicle)

Alice and Edith are sisters, best friends, and arch-enemies. Alice, the 'good girl', is everything the stunning, wanton and morally whimsical Edith is not. Both have an unhealthy attraction to shame and disgrace, and both are expert manipulators - a power that is tested and exploited when the plane they are travelling on is commandeered by a blind terrorist in what may or may not be a hijacking. When Alice is chosen to communicate with the hostage negotiator, Edith decides to align herself with the terrorist. Inexplicably drawn to the negotiator, Alice finds it harder and harder to distinguish allies from enemies in what begins to feel like an elliptical airborne game show. Trapped on the plane with a pill-popping pregnant heiress, archaeologists on their way to a reunion, a wealthy, womanising Indian man and a dog named Verne, Alice learns valuable lessons about sibling rivalry, love and about who she is -- even while she's pretending to be someone else.