Join us on a literary world trip!
Add this book to bookshelf
Grey
Write a new comment Default profile 50px
Grey
Subscribe to read the full book or read the first pages for free!
All characters reduced
Artifact - cover

We are sorry! The publisher (or author) gave us the instruction to take down this book from our catalog. But please don't worry, you still have more than 500,000 other books you can enjoy!

Artifact

Arlene Heyman

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

  • 0
  • 2
  • 2

Summary

“Thrilling . . . Like all the best literature, Artifact leaves you feeling as if you've been through a major life experience and you're stronger for it.” - Sandra Newman, author of The Heavens 
 
A sweeping debut novel about love, sex, motherhood, and ambition that follows a gifted and subversive scientist's struggle to reach beyond cultural constraints for the life she wants.  
  
From practicing psychiatrist and critically acclaimed author of Scary Old Sex (“the kind of bliss that lifts right off the page” -Dwight Garner, NYT), Artifact is the dazzling, half-century-spanning story of biologist Lottie Kristin. Born in Michigan in the early 1940s to a taciturn mother and embittered father, Lottie is independent from the start, fascinated with the mysteries of nature and the human body. By age sixteen, she and her sweetheart, cheerful high school sports hero Charlie Hart, have been through a devastatingly traumatic pregnancy. When an injury ends Charlie's football career four years later, the two move to Texas hoping for a fresh start.  
  
There, torn between the vitality of the antiwar movement and her family's traditional values, Lottie discovers the joys of motherhood, and reconnects with her interest in biology and experimentation, taking a job as a lab technician. While Charlie's depression pervades their home, Lottie's instinct is toward life; though every step is a struggle, she opts for single motherhood, graduate school, a career, and eventually, a marriage that makes space for all that she is.  
  
Bravely and wisely written, Artifact is an intimate and propulsive portrait of a whole woman, a celebration of her refusal to be defined by others' imaginations, and a meditation on the glorious chaos of biological life.
Available since: 07/07/2021.
Print length: 288 pages.

Other books that might interest you

  • The Girl Who Cried Diamonds & Other Stories - cover

    The Girl Who Cried Diamonds &...

    Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

    • 0
    • 7
    • 0
    “Bridging tenderness and violence, and brimming with danger and magic, The Girl Who Cried Diamonds will leave you breathless.” — Anuja Varghese, author of Chrysalis
    		 
    “In these 14 hard-edged and unapologetic stories, debut author Garcia tackles topics ranging from human trafficking and drug abuse to eating disorders and middle-age angst, and in no-frills prose, carves out bizarre and palpable realities, breathing strange life into a horde of depressed, deprived, and abused characters.” — Publishers Weekly
    		 
    The boundaries between realist and fabulist, literary and speculative, are shattered in this remarkable debut collection for readers of Carmen Maria Machado, André Alexis, and Angélique Lalonde 
    A girl born in a small, unnamed pueblo is blessed—or cursed—with the ability to produce valuable gems from her bodily fluids. A tired wife and mother escapes the confines of her oppressive life and body by shapeshifting into a cloud. A girl reckons with the death of her father and her changing familial dynamics while slowly, mysteriously losing her physical senses.
    		 
    Infused with keen insight and presented in startling prose, the stories in this dark, magnetic collection by newcomer Rebecca Hirsch Garcia invite the reader into an uncanny world out of step with reality while exploring the personal and interpersonal in a way that is undeniably, distinctly human.
    Show book
  • Deep in the Forest - cover

    Deep in the Forest

    Erina Reddan

    • 1
    • 13
    • 0
    What lies behind the gates of the Sanctuary?
    'Urgent. Come tomorrow. Can't wait any longer.'
    Charli Trenthan plans to leave her hometown of Stone Lake. But when she receives a cryptic message from a member of the Sanctuary, a conservative closed community nestled in the forest, she is determined to find answers.
    A gruesome discovery soon lands Charli in hot water with the police, but how is the Sanctuary connected? As she digs deeper, dark secrets are uncovered and the fight to prove her innocence turns into a fight for her life.
    A gripping thriller with a shocking conclusion that will leave you spellbound, Deep in the Forest raises questions about who we trust and why.
    Show book
  • The Spirit of Love - cover

    The Spirit of Love

    Barbara Cartland

    • 1
    • 4
    • 0
    Beautiful and innocent, yet perceptive and intelligent the Rector’s daughter, Odella Wayne, suspects that the local circus fortune-teller, Madame Zosina, is using her ‘special powers’ to hoodwink British sailors into revealing their warships’ embarkation times at Portsmouth in order to pass the information on to Napoleon’s spies and the French Navy is waiting to attack them at sea.This is 1814 and a year before the Battle of Waterloo when the French are Great Britain’s deadliest enemies and they will stop at nothing to defeat and humiliate the British whenever they feel that they can get away with it.When Odella reports her fears to the dashing and handsome war hero, the Marquis of Midhurst, he asks her to risk her life for her country by drugging Madame Zosina and secretly taking her place in the fortune-tellers’ tent at the circus.Drawn into the terrifying world of wartime espionage, Odella alone can potentially identity a French assassin on a mission to kill His Royal Highness the Prince Regent, having overheard his dastardly plotting. At terrible risk of losing her life, she has already lost her heart to the Marquis when he saves her from the killer’s knife and sweeps her up in his arms –
    Show book
  • The Poison Belt - cover

    The Poison Belt

    Arthur Conan Doyle

    • 1
    • 3
    • 0
    The team of explorers from The Lost World reunites to face the end of the world in this adventure by the creator of Sherlock Holmes.Prof. George Challenger has made a troubling discovery: The Earth is about to pass through a belt of poisonous gas. He quickly summons his three friends—Professors Summerlee, Lord John Roxton, and Edward Malone—to his home in Sussex with a request to bring tanks of oxygen. Once the men arrive, Professor Challenger leads them and his wife to a sealed room where they can wait out the crisis and observe the chaos outside. But when the poisonous cloud finally dissipates, there is no telling what they will find . . .
    Show book
  • Cursed Bunny - cover

    Cursed Bunny

    Bora Chung

    • 1
    • 4
    • 0
    Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, Cursed Bunny is a genre-defying collection of short stories by Korean author Bora Chung. Blurring the lines between magical realism, horror, and science-fiction, Chung uses elements of the fantastic and surreal to address the very real horrors and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society. Anton Hur's translation skilfully captures the way Chung's prose effortlessly glides from being terrifying to wryly humorous.
    Show book
  • The Wrong'un - cover

    The Wrong'un

    Catherine Evans

    • 1
    • 3
    • 0
    Meet the Newells, a big family of good lookers and hard grafters. From their sleepy working class backwater, the siblings break into Oxford academia, London's high life, the glossy world of magazine publishing and the stratospheric riches of New York's hedge funds. Then there's Paddy, the wrong'un in their midst, who prefers life's underbelly. As things fall apart around his sister Bea, is Paddy behind it all? And why does matriarch Edie turn a blind eye to her son's malevolence? Will she stand by and watch while he wrecks the lives of her other children? Just how much is she willing to sacrifice to protect her son? The book opens with Edie, now in her seventies, who looks back on her early married life with her husband, George, and their ever-growing brood. She loved having babies, but resented their growth and increasing independence. She recalls the horror and confusion surrounding the death of her toddler son, Timmy. Even though it happened forty years ago, she still blames her brother, his uncle, for falling asleep while he was supposed to be looking after the children. Now, her favourite son, Paddy, has just been released from prison for dangerous driving. She is good at making excuses for him. All her other children are successful, and have done extremely well in their chosen careers, but it becomes apparent that she begrudges her only daughter's success. Why does she resent her daughter so much? Paddy is malevolent, violent, bullying, cruel... Edie has never forgiven herself for giving him up to the care system before she married George. He has never fitted in with his siblings, and is the bad apple that can ruin the whole batch. The only person he has ever cared about is his stepfather, George, who saw only too clearly what Edie has always been blind to. Bea, the only daughter in the family, has grown up knowing her mother doesn't love her. She is a successful journalist, and adores her husband, David, and her stepchildren, but longs for a baby of her own. Then suddenly David dies. In the midst of her grief, her glamorous cleaning lady, Lorena, flaunts her pregnancy. She insists that the baby is David's, and is willing to take a DNA test to prove it. Welcome to the world of the Newells, where nothing is as it seems.
    Show book