Rosemary doesn't talk much, and about certain things she's silent.
She had a sister, Fern, her whirlwind other half, who vanished from her life in circumstances she wishes she could forget. And it’s been ten years since she last saw her beloved older brother Lowell. Now at college, Rosemary starts to see she can’t go forward without going back to the time when aged five, she was sent away from home to her grandparents and returned to find Fern gone. 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.
"Monkeyshines aside, this is a story of Everyfamily in which loss engraves relationships, truth is a soulful stalker and coming-of-age means facing down the mirror, recognizing the shape-shifting notion of self." - Barbara Kingsolver, The New York Times Sunday Book Review
"Cagey, feisty, funny and philosophical, Karen Joy Fowler’s sixth novel slyly establishes much of its inner essence — to do with the damaged dynamics of its narrator’s family — before it spells out certain crucial details of its plot … Opening the action in 1996 means starting ‘in the middle of my story,’ according to Rosemary, and the deeper she goes into her tale, the more fluidly the book becomes a juggling of flashbacks, flash-forwards and careful avoidances of germane information … The heart of the novel — and it has a big, warm, loudly beating heart throughout — is in its gradually pieced-together tale of family togetherness, disruption and reconciliation." - Maureen Corrigan, NPR
Karen Joy Fowler is the author of three short story collections and seven novels, including The Jane Austen Book Club. Her seventh novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, won the PEN/Faulkner Prize and has sold over a million copies. Fowler attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she majored in political