Judith Claire Mitchell

A Reunion of Ghosts Judith Claire Mitchell

Publisher Marketing: A compulsively readable literary masterpiece, "A Reunion of Ghosts "is the shared confessional of three sisters who have decided to kill themselves at the end of the twentieth century, honoring the dark legacy that has haunted their extraordinary family for decades."How do three sisters write a single suicide note?"In the waning days of 1999, the Alter sisters Lady, Vee, and Delph finalize their plans to end their lives. Their reasons are not theirs alone; they are the last in a long line of Alters who have killed themselves, beginning with their great-grandmother, the wife of a Jewish Nobel Prize winning chemist who developed the first poison gas used in World War I and the lethal agent used in Third Reich gas chambers. The chemist himself, their son Richard, and Richard s children all followed suit. The childless sisters also define themselves by their own bad luck. Lady, the oldest, never really resumed living after her divorce. Vee is facing cancer s return. And Delph, the youngest, is resigned to a spinster s life of stifled dreams. But despite their pain they love each other fiercely, and share a darkly brilliant sense of humor. As they gather in the ancestral Upper West Side apartment to close the circle of the Alter curse, an epic story about four generations of one family inspired in part by the troubled life of German-Jewish Fritz Haber, Nobel Prize winner and inventor of chlorine gas unfolds. "A Reunion of Ghosts "is a magnificent tale of fate and blood, sin and absolution; partly a memoir of sisters unified by a singular burden, partly an unflinching eulogy of those who have gone before, and above all a profound commentary on the events of the twentieth century." Review Citations: Library Journal Prepub Alert 10/15/2014 pg. 64 (EAN 9780062355881, Hardcover) Kirkus Reviews 01/15/2015 (EAN 9780062355881, Hardcover) - *Starred Review Publishers Weekly 01/19/2015 (EAN 9780062355881, Hardcover) - *Starred Review Library Journal 02/01/2015 pg. 74 (EAN 9780062355881, Hardcover) Booklist 02/01/2015 pg. 24 (EAN 9780062355881, Hardcover) Romantic Times 04/01/2015 pg. 31 (EAN 9780062355881, Hardcover) People Weekly 04/06/2015 pg. 40 (EAN 9780062355881, Hardcover) Contributor Bio:  Mitchell, Judith Claire JUDITH CLAIRE MITCHELL, author of the novel The Last Day of the War, is an English professor at the University of WisconsinMadison, where she directs the MFA program in creative writing, ranked number three in the US by Poets & Writers. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Judy has received fellowships from the James A. Michener/Copernicus Society, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Arts Institute of the University of Wisconsin and elsewhere. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband, the artist Don Friedlich.