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Act of God: A Novel Audiobook
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Publisher Description
Jill Ciment’s books have been hailed as “stunning,” “powerful,” and “provocative.” Alice Sebold has called her works “beautifully written.” Now the author of Heroic Measures (“Smart and funny and completely surprising . . . I loved every page.” —Ann Patchett; “Brave, generous, nearly perfect.” —Los Angeles Times) has given us a contemporary noir novel that starts out a comedy of errors and turns darker at every hairpin turn. It’s the summer of 2015, Brooklyn. The city is sweltering from another record-breaking heat wave, this one accompanied by biblical rains. Edith, a recently retired legal librarian, and her identical twin sister, Kat, a feckless romantic who’s mistaken her own eccentricity for originality, discover something ominous in their hall closet: it seems to be phosphorescent, it’s a mushroom . . . and it’s sprouting from their wall. Upstairs, their landlady, Vida Cebu, a Shakespearian actress far more famous for her TV commercials for Ziberax (the first female sexual enhancement pill) than for her stage work, discovers that a petite Russian girl, a runaway au pair, has been secretly living in her guest room closet. When the police arrest the intruder, they find a second mushroom, also glowing, under the intruder’s bedding. Soon the HAZMAT squad arrives, and the four women are forced to evacuate the contaminated row house with only the clothes on their backs. As the mold infestation spreads from row house to high-rise, and frightened, bewildered New Yorkers wait out this plague (is it an act of God?) on their city and property, the four women become caught up in a centrifugal nightmare. Part horror story, part screwball comedy, Jill Ciment’s brilliant suspense novel looks at what happens when our lives—so seemingly set and ordered yet so precariously balanced—break down in the wake of calamity. It is, as well, a novel about love (familial and profound) and how it can appear from the most unlikely circumstances.
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“Barbara Rosenblat is an outstanding performer. Here she uses varied tones and pitches to reflect four quirky but strong women…Rosenblat’s delivery is well paced and convincing as she assumes a voice for each character. Listeners will enjoy the way she projects the appealing personalities Ciment has created. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
— AudioFile
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“In this swiftly paced, niftily written comedy turned horror novel, even the most settled lives are upended, the tiniest character flaws come back to bite, and love and redemption arrive when you least expect them.”
— More -
“Ciment’s nightmare-comedy reads like an urbane spin on the Book of Job, written in the wake of Superstorm Sandy.”
— Seattle Times -
“A compact, droll farce, light-hearted and pleasurable as a chocolate truffle, yet with a nugget of hard, somewhat unpalatable truths in the center…Interweaving plotlines are so nimbly handled that every development seems simultaneously unpredictable, yet organically predetermined.”
— Locus magazine -
“Her two final scenes mingle horror, humor, and tenderness as they lead us toward a final image that perfectly captures the damaged grandeur of the human condition.”
— Daily Beast -
“Humanity, warmth, and wry humor light up Ciment’s noirish novel…This absorbing novel about a luminescent fungus affixes itself to your psyche like a spore and quickly spreads to your heart, setting everything in its wake aglow.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Awards
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Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award
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About Jill Ciment
Jill Ciment was born in Montreal, Canada. She is the author of three novels: The Tattoo Artist, Teeth of the Dog, and The Law of Falling Bodies; Small Claims, a collection of stories; and Half a Life, a memoir. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts, an NEA Japan Fellowship Prize, two New York State Fellowships for the Arts, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Ciment is a professor at the University of Florida. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.
About Barbara Rosenblat
Barbara Rosenblat, one of the most awarded narrators in the business, was selected by AudioFile magazine as one of the Golden Voices of the Twentieth Century. She has received the prestigious Audie Award multiple times and has earned more than fifty AudioFile Earphones Awards. She has also appeared in film, television, and theater, both in London’s West End and on Broadway.