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Joy Sorman is a novelist and documentarian based in Paris.Her first novel, Boys, boys, boys, was awarded the 2005 Prix de Flore. In 2013, she received the Prix François Mauriac from the Académie française for Comme une bête. Life Sciences is her first novel to be translated into English. Lara Vergnaud is a literary translator from the French. She is the recipient of the 2019 French Voices Grand Prize and two PEN/Heim Translation Grants, and was a finalist for the 2019 Best Translated Book Award. Her forthcoming translations include works by Mohamed Leftah and Franck Bouysse. She currently lives in Washington, D.C. Catherine Lacey is the author of four works of fiction: Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Certain American States, and Pew. She's recently published work in The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Believer. Her books have been translated into several languages.
It's an often dark tale about women who struggle with health issues that the medical establishment cannot-or does not want to-cure, or even identify. But stories can be changed, and Ninon might just be the woman to do it. Life Sciences is an immersive, harrowing novel about the power of stories to turn a captivating fable into a prophecy. -Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews When a French teenager inherits a painful curse, ordinary life ends and a quest for healing begins.... The second novel from Sorman, a prizewinning novelist based in Paris, comes to us in a beautiful translation by Vergnaud.... [T]he ending is worth getting to. -Kirkus Reviews An arresting allegory.... [Ninon's] determination to jump 'out of the line of cursed, mad, degenerate women' makes her an engaging character as well as a powerful cipher of resistance to the stories she's grown up with.... Readers will feel empowered by this tale of taking control of one's body. -Publishers Weekly Sorman uses her protagonist's suffering to critique the medical establishment, with its massive imbalance of power between doctor and patient.... Life Sciences is a lonely book-and, for that reason, an effective one.... It forces the reader to reckon with what Ninon is going through. -Lily Meyer, NPR
