<i>New York Times</i> Notable Book 2013<br><br><i>"</i>At once wry and poingnant." —<i>The New Yorker</i><br><br>"A masterwork...Both wise and deeply enjoyable." —Cynthia Ozick, author of <i>Foreign Bodies</i><br><b><br>The renowned <i>New Yorker </i>writer and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lore Segal—whom <i>The New York Times</i> declared "closer than anyone to writing the Great American Novel"—delivers a hilarious, poignant and profoundly moving tale of living, loving and aging in America today<br><br></b>At Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, doctors have noticed a marked uptick in Alzheimer's patients. People who seemed perfectly lucid just a day earlier suddenly show signs of advanced dementia. Is it just normal aging, or an epidemic? Is it a coincidence, or a secret terrorist plot?<br><br>In the looking-glass world of <i>Half the Kingdom—</i>where terrorist paranoia and end-of-the-world hysteria mask deeper fears of mortality; where parents' and their grown children's feelings vacillate between frustration and tenderness; and where the broken medical system leads one character to quip, "Kafka wrote slice-of-life fiction"—all is familiar and yet slightly askew.<br><br>Lore Segal masterfully interweaves her characters' lives—lives that, for good or for ill, all converge in Cedar's ER—into a funny, tragic, and tender portrait of how we live today.