The USA Today bestselling author of In

Another Time

reimagines the pioneering, passionate life of Marie Curie

using a parallel structure to create two alternative timelines, one that

mirrors her real life, one that explores the consequences for Marie and for

science if she’d made a different choice.

In Poland in 1891, Marie Curie

(then Marya Sklodowska) was engaged to a budding mathematician, Kazimierz

Zorawski. But when his mother insisted she was too poor and not good enough, he

broke off the engagement. A heartbroken Marya left Poland for Paris, where she

would attend the Sorbonne to study chemistry and physics. Eventually Marie

Curie would go on to change the course of science forever and be the first

woman to win a Nobel Prize.But what if she had made a

different choice?

 

What if she had stayed in Poland,

married Kazimierz at the age of twenty-four, and never attended the Sorbonne or

discovered radium? What if she had chosen a life of domesticity with a constant

hunger for knowledge in Russian Poland where education for women was restricted,

instead of studying science in Paris and meeting Pierre Curie?

Entwining Marie Curie’s real story

with Marya Zorawska’s fictional one, Half Life explores loves lost and

destinies unfulfilled—and probes issues of loyalty and identity, gender and

class, motherhood and sisterhood, fame and anonymity, scholarship and

knowledge. Through parallel contrasting versions of Marya’s life, Jillian

Cantor’s unique historical novel asks what would have happened if a great

scientific mind was denied opportunity and access to education. It examines how

the lives of one remarkable woman and the people she loved – as well as the world

at large and course of science and history—might have been irrevocably changed

in ways both great and small.