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We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

by Karen Joy Fowler

Family, memory, and the meaning of sisterhood

Regular price $17.72 USD
Regular price $29.54 USD Sale price $17.72 USD
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Paperback New English

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AlbakiReads Editorial

Family, memory, and the meaning of sisterhood

The Cooke family’s unusual history shapes Rosemary’s account of childhood, silence, and separation. Fern is not simply a sibling in the conventional sense: she is a chimpanzee Rosemary regarded as her twin and closest counterpart. That relationship gives the family story a wider frame, bringing questions about memory, language, science, and what counts as human into a domestic setting. The publisher description also points to the consequences of choices made with good intentions, while keeping Rosemary’s reasons for beginning her story in the middle as part of the book’s premise.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in family-centered fiction and complicated sibling bonds.
  • Readers drawn to stories that connect personal memory with questions about science and humanity.

Themes

Family and sisterhoodMemory and silenceLanguageScience and humanityConsequences of well-intentioned actions

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award
Finalist for the Man Booker Prize
A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Century

The New York Times bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club introduces a middle-class American family that is ordinary in every way but one in this award-winning novel.


Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. "I was raised with a chimpanzee," she explains. "I tell you Fern was a chimp and already you aren't thinking of her as my sister. But until Fern's expulsion...she was my twin, my funhouse mirror, my whirlwind other half and I loved her as a sister." As a child, Rosemary never stopped talking. Then, something happened, and Rosemary wrapped herself in silence.

In We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler weaves her most accomplished work to date--a tale of loving but fallible people whose well-intentioned actions lead to heartbreaking consequences.

"A gripping, big-hearted book...through the tender voice of her protagonist, Fowler has a lot to say about family, memory, language, science, and indeed the question of what constitutes a human being."--Khaled Hosseini
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