Literary Fiction
Uncertain Lives
A novel of friendship, identity, and the uncertain nature of reality.
Journalist Angela has spent a lifetime in the orbit of her brilliant and enigmatic friend, Devra: a scientist, a loner, and a woman who has always resisted being fully known. Yet that is all about to change. Devra, now in failing health, allows Angela access to her private stories, essays, and reflections.
As Angela sets out to write Devra’s biography, she is drawn into a labyrinth of ideas and inner worlds. Devra’s writings challenge everything Angela believes about memory, truth, and the self.
Are we singular, coherent individuals, or collections of competing identities shaped by chance, perception, and desire?
Through interplay of narrative voices and embedded stories, Uncertain Lives is an intimate literary novel about friendship and the shifting boundary between reality and imagination. Perfect for readers who are drawn to searching questions, philosophical discussions, and the beautiful uncertainty at the heart of human existence.
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"A jam-packed novel of ideas, the book uses Devra’s writing to explore everything from childhood sexual assaults to musings on octopus brains, the role of uncertainty in life, and the question of whether we are singular individuals or merely collections of shattered identities. Moving through the first-person voice of Alison, who herself is fractured by the name that Devra gives her, the book traces both how a life is constructed from the inside, through Devra’s diaristic writing, and how it becomes interpreted and understood by another in the eyes of Alison. The result is a novel that asks the big questions about how we construct reality—and whether we can ever claim to know it fully.
“I close my eyes in disbelief. My god. I think. Is that Devra’s revenge, if I can call it that? Is her world entirely within her imagination?”
That thematic boldness is reinforced by the novel’s structural play. Alison’s time with Devra and her writing slowly takes shape as an experimental biography within the novel: Devra Denniston: A Life Imagined.
Playing with the sense of verisimilitude, tracking both the life as the individual experiences it, as her friend writes about it, and then again as the biography itself is received by the public creates a self-reflexive experimentation within the book itself. What is true and what isn’t true? Uncertain Lives throws every fact into doubt—most explicitly by airing Devra’s unproven theories about her own family and the circumstances of her life." — Independent Book Review
"Uncertainty, like hope, leaves the door open for a miracle to slip through."
- Alison, Uncertain Lives
". . . a caring, searching novel, at once the story of a lifelong friendship and a brilliant rumination on how we come to know others and ourselves.."
- Author Zach Powers
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