
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
A Novel
Karen Joy Fowler(Author)
G P Putnam's Sons (Publisher)
Published on 25. February 2014
Book
Paperback/Softback
336 pages
978-0-14-218082-2 (ISBN)
Description
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 novel that won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.
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
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
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Publishing group
Penguin Putnam Inc
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 203 mm
Width: 131 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
251 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-14-218082-2 (9780142180822)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Karen Joy Fowler
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Book
05/2013
Marian Wood Books/Putnam
€44.80
Article exhausted; check different version

E-Book
05/2013
G.P. Putnam's Sons
€9.99
Available for download
Person
Karen Joy Fowler, a PEN/Faulkner and California Book Award winner, is the author of six novels (two of them New York Times bestsellers) and four short story collections. She has been a Dublin IMPAC nominee, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2014. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.