Download Act of God: A Novel AudioBook Free
From the author of Heroic Measures ["Smart and funny and completely surprising - I loved every page" (Ann Patchett)], a modern day noir novel that begins a comedy of errors and turns darker at every hairpin turn - in regards to a lethal form of mold spreading throughout New York City, about the townhouse in which it's first discovered, and individuals moving into it whose lives are suddenly upended. It's the summertime of 2015, Brooklyn. The city is sweltering from another record-breaking heat wave, that one associated with 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 well-known 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 moving into her guest-room closet. When the police arrest the intruder, they find another 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 the backs. As the mold infestation spreads from row house to high-rise and frightened, bewildered New Yorkers wait out this plague (could it be an act of God?) on the 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 talks about what happens when our lives - so seemingly set and ordered, yet so precariously balanced - break down in the wake of calamity. A novel as well about love (familial and profound) and how it can appear from the most unlikely circumstances.
