Louisa Hall

‘Compelling, elegant and bitingly smart.’ Nell Stevens, author of Briefly, A Delicious LifeA Frankenstein for the twenty-first century by the Dylan Thomas Prize-shortlisted author of Trinity and Speak A woman begins work on a novel about Mary Shelley while pregnant for the first time. Recently married, she has just moved from New York to Montana. As the woman writes, fragments of Shelley’s story begin to detach themselves from the page. Moving through her reproductive years, Shelley endured a catalogue of losses painful beyond comprehension. Still, she wrote, conceiving Frankenstein in 1816. The woman’s experiences of pregnancy, miscarriage and labour are traumatic and disorienting, especially in the context of political upheaval, climate crisis, and an ongoing pandemic. Finally, she gives birth to a daughter and together they emerge into another world. Then a friend from the past reappears. Anna is a biochemist who has been struggling to become a parent, a scientist who sees everything as an experiment. How far will she go in her desire to bring a baby into being? ? Devastating and joyful, elegant and exacting, Reproduction is a powerful reminder of the hazards and the rewards involved in creating new life.

A woman attempts to write a novel about Mary Shelley. and is interrupted by several pregnancies, eventually coming to fixate on a friend who is also attempting to conceive a child.

A lucid, genre-defying novel that explores the surreality of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood in a country in crisis A novelist attempts to write a book about Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, a mother and artist whose harrowing pregnancies reveal the cost of human reproduction. Soon, however, the novelist's own painful experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, as well as her increasing awareness of larger threats from climate change to pandemic, force her to give up on the book and turn instead to writing a contemporary Frankenstein, based on the story of an old friend who mysteriously reappears in her life.In telling a story that ranges from pregnancy to miscarriage to traumatic birth, from motherhood to the frontiers of reproductive science, Louisa Hall draws powerfully from her own experiences, as well as the stories of two other women: Mary Shelley and Anna, a scientist and would-be parent who is contemplating the possibilities, and morality, of genetic modification.Both devastating and joyful, elegant and exacting, Reproduction is a powerful reminder of the hazards and the rewards involved in creating new life, and a profoundly feminist exploration of motherhood, female friendship, and artistic ambition.

From the acclaimed author of Speak comes a kaleidoscopic novel about Robert Oppenheimer--father of the atomic bomb--as told by seven fictional charactersJ. Robert Oppenheimer was a brilliant scientist, a champion of liberal causes, and a complex and often contradictory character. He loyally protected his Communist friends, only to later betray them under questioning. He repeatedly lied about love affairs. And he defended the use of the atomic bomb he helped create, before ultimately lobbying against nuclear proliferation.Through narratives that cross time and space, a set of characters bears witness to the life of Oppenheimer, from a secret service agent who tailed him in San Francisco, to the young lover of a colleague in Los Alamos, to a woman fleeing McCarthyism who knew him on St. John. As these men and women fall into the orbit of a brilliant but mercurial mind at work, all consider his complicated legacy while also uncovering deep and often unsettling truths about their own lives.In this stunning, elliptical novel, Louisa Hall has crafted a breathtaking and explosive story about the ability of the human mind to believe what it wants, about public and private tragedy, and about power and guilt. Blending science with literature and fiction with biography, Trinity asks searing questions about what it means to truly know someone, and about the secrets we keep from the world and from ourselves.

In the vein of Coetzee's Summertime or W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants, Trinity revisits the life of scientist Robert Oppenheimer as narrated by seven fictional characters who claim to have known him.

From the acclaimed author of Speak comes a kaleidoscopic novel about Robert Oppenheimer--father of the atomic bomb--as told by seven fictional characters.J. Robert Oppenheimer was a brilliant scientist, a champion of liberal causes, and a complex and often contradictory character. He loyally protected his Communist friends, only to later betray them under questioning. He repeatedly lied about love affairs. And he defended the use of the atomic bomb he helped create, before ultimately lobbying against nuclear proliferation.Through narratives that cross time and space, a set of characters bears witness to the life of Oppenheimer, from a secret service agent who tailed him in San Francisco, to the young lover of a colleague in Los Alamos, to a woman fleeing McCarthyism who knew him on St. John. As these men and women fall into the orbit of a brilliant but mercurial mind at work, all consider his complicated legacy while also uncovering deep and often unsettling truths about their own lives.In this stunning, elliptical novel, Louisa Hall has crafted a breathtaking and explosive story about the ability of the human mind to believe what it wants, about public and private tragedy, and about power and guilt. Blending science with literature and fiction with biography, Trinity asks searing questions about what it means to truly know someone, and about the secrets we keep from the world and from ourselves.

From the acclaimed author of Speak comes a kaleidoscopic novel about Robert Oppenheimer--father of the atomic bomb--as told by seven fictional characters.J. Robert Oppenheimer was a brilliant scientist, a champion of liberal causes, and a complex and often contradictory character. He loyally protected his Communist friends, only to later betray them under questioning. He repeatedly lied about love affairs. And he defended the use of the atomic bomb he helped create, before ultimately lobbying against nuclear proliferation.Through narratives that cross time and space, a set of characters bears witness to the life of Oppenheimer, from a secret service agent who tailed him in San Francisco, to the young lover of a colleague in Los Alamos, to a woman fleeing McCarthyism who knew him on St. John. As these men and women fall into the orbit of a brilliant but mercurial mind at work, all consider his complicated legacy while also uncovering deep and often unsettling truths about their own lives.In this stunning, elliptical novel, Louisa Hall has crafted a breathtaking and explosive story about the ability of the human mind to believe what it wants, about public and private tragedy, and about power and guilt. Blending science with literature and fiction with biography, Trinity asks searing questions about what it means to truly know someone, and about the secrets we keep from the world and from ourselves.

From the acclaimed author of Speak comes a kaleidoscopic novel about Robert Oppenheimer--father of the atomic bomb--as told by seven fictional charactersJ. Robert Oppenheimer was a brilliant scientist, a champion of liberal causes, and a complex and often contradictory character. He loyally protected his Communist friends, only to later betray them under questioning. He repeatedly lied about love affairs. And he defended the use of the atomic bomb he helped create, before ultimately lobbying against nuclear proliferation.Through narratives that cross time and space, a set of characters bears witness to the life of Oppenheimer, from a secret service agent who tailed him in San Francisco, to the young lover of a colleague in Los Alamos, to a woman fleeing McCarthyism who knew him on St. John. As these men and women fall into the orbit of a brilliant but mercurial mind at work, all consider his complicated legacy while also uncovering deep and often unsettling truths about their own lives.In this stunning, elliptical novel, Louisa Hall has crafted a breathtaking and explosive story about the ability of the human mind to believe what it wants, about public and private tragedy, and about power and guilt. Blending science with literature and fiction with biography, Trinity asks searing questions about what it means to truly know someone, and about the secrets we keep from the world and from ourselves.

A thoughtful, poignant novel that explores the creation of Artificial Intelligence--illuminating the very human need for communication, connection, and understanding.In a narrative that spans geography and time, from the Atlantic Ocean in the seventeenth century, to a correctional institute in Texas in the near future, and told from the perspectives of five very different characters, Speak considers what it means to be human, and what it means to be less than fully alive.A young Puritan woman travels to the New World with her unwanted new husband. Alan Turing, the renowned mathematician and code breaker, writes letters to his best friend's mother. A Jewish refugee and professor of computer science struggles to reconnect with his increasingly detached wife. An isolated and traumatized young girl exchanges messages with an intelligent software program. A former Silicon Valley Wunderkind is imprisoned for creating illegal lifelike dolls.Each of these characters is attempting to communicate across gaps--to estranged spouses, lost friends, future readers, or a computer program that may or may not understand them. In dazzling and electrifying prose, Louisa Hall explores how the chasm between computer and human--shrinking rapidly with today's technological advances--echoes the gaps that exist between ordinary people. Though each speaks from a distinct place and moment in time, all five characters share the need to express themselves while simultaneously wondering if they will ever be heard, or understood.

For fans of David Mitchell and Margaret Atwood comes this poignant novel from Waterstones Book Club author Louisa Hall, with a tale will make readers everywhere question what it really means to be human. Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven, calls Speak the 'rarest of finds'.

A "splendid" (The Boston Globe) debut novel about the complex bonds of three sisters and their Philadelphia family's legacy, by the author of Reproduction. For more than thirty years, William Adair's faith in life was based on two indisputable principles: the exceptional good looks and athletic talents of his three daughters and the historical status of his family in their Philadelphia suburb. After suffering a stroke, William wakes up in his hospital bed to realize that his world has collapsed: his children are less extraordinary than he had remembered and his family's notable history has been forgotten. Having lost their father's pride, the three sisters struggle to define themselves. Their mother, whose memory has started to fade, is unable to help them recall the talented girls they used to be. For three generations, a carriage house has stood on the Adair property. Built by William's grandfather, it was William's childhood refuge and a sign of the family's prominence. Now held captive by a neighbor due to a zoning error, the house has decayed beyond recognition. Rallying to save their father, Diana, Elizabeth, and Isabelle take on the battle for the carriage house that once stood as a symbol of his place in the world. Overcoming misunderstandings and betrayals both deep in the past and painfully new, each of the Adairs ultimately finds a place of forgiveness. The Carriage House is a moving, beautifully wrought debut.

Jane Austen's Persuasion is brought into the twenty-first century by Louisa Hall in The Carriage House, a stunning novel of family and forgiveness, set in contemporary suburban America.Elizabeth, Diana and Izzy, three sisters who have lived a privileged life in suburban America are the pride and joy of their father William. All three were tennis prodigies as children, popular, and successful at school: they seemed destined for greatness.But the idyllic façade masks a family who is in turmoil - their mother is suffering with early onset Alzheimer's which is making Izzy spiral out of control, Diana is failing her career, Elizabeth feels trapped by her domesticity and their father is still in love with his old sweetheart, Adelia.When William is suddenly taken ill, he reveals that he has lost faith in the things he had once held closest to his heart: the promise of his gifted daughters and his grandfather's beautiful carriage house, now lost to the family. Devastated by his disappointment in them and desperate to make their father proud, the sisters band together to restore his beloved carriage house which is now dilapidated, unloved and under threat of demolition by the neighbourhood association, and to re-build a family in disarray.Touching, intelligent and compassionate, The Carriage House is a drama about family, relationships and forgiveness - and, most importantly, that it is never too late to make amends.'Louisa Hall writes about the wars waged between neighbours and family members with extraordinary sympathy and a keen sense of humour. Part Jane Austen, part John Cheever, this tale of upheaval in a suburban Philadelphia household marks the debut of a stunning new writer' Philipp Meyer, author of American Rust 'Every sentence in The Carriage House is full of clarity, attention, and grace. Louisa Hall is a writer to be admired' Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds 'The Carriage House is gorgeously detailed and rife with betrayal, heartbreak, nostalgia, lost love, and possibilities for redemption. You will ache for the Adair family, cringe at their mistakes, and plead with them to make peace with each other before it's too late. In her smart and insightful debut, Louisa Hall examines the ways in which we fail and forgive others-and ourselves' Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Birds of a Lesser ParadiseLouisa Hall was born in Philadelphia in 1982 and grew up in the nearby suburb of Haverford. She graduated from Harvard in 2004 and went on to play squash professionally for three years. She is now completing her Ph.D. in literature at the University of Texas at Austin, and lives in Los Angeles with her husband. Her poems have been published in journals such as The New Republic, The Southwest Review, and Ellipsis. The Carriage House is her first novel.