FROM THE PUBLISHER

Does Alice really hate her sister, or is that love? Was she really enrolled in grad school, or was that an elaborate hoax? Is this really a hijacking, or is it merely the effect of living backwards?

Following her acclaimed debut, The Mineral Palace, Heidi Julavits presents a quirky, compelling new novel about two sisters, a bizarre event, and the elusive nature of truth.

Author Biography: Heidi Julavits is the author of The Mineral Palace. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1999, Esquire, Zoetrope, McSweeney's, and Time.

FROM THE CRITICS

Elle

...darkly humorous, acutely edgy tale of emotional psychological survival...

New York Times Book Review

...savage and funny...Julavits has transformed our paranoia into a grab bag of impieties, skepticism and levity.

The New York Times

Julavits's first novel, The Mineral Palace, was an atmospheric horror show set in the Depression-era American West. The Effect of Living Backwards is far livelier and less portentous. Alice's self-loathing and her complex relationship with Edith provide the emotional core of a story that is savage and funny. The book is improbable, sure, but so wildly inventive that you hardly care. — Taylor Antrim

The Los Angeles Times

The Effect of Living Backwards shows off a young novelist with talent to burn and a desire to push beyond the smug posturing of many of her literary peers. — Stephen Metcalf

The Washington Post

Heidi Julavits takes the title of her second novel from a passage in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. "The effect of living backwards," the Queen tells Alice in that book, is that "it always make one a little giddy at first." For Julavits, whose first novel, The Mineral Palace, was published in 2000, the events of Sept. 11 seemed to create a kind of looking glass -- a tragedy so hard to comprehend that afterward we approached the world with a sort of giddy, guilty trepidation. — Alex AbramovichRead all 9 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

An absolute tour de force of apparently limitless imaginative ability, deep psychological insight, and astonishing verbal precision. In one fell swoop, Heidi Julavits establishes herself as the Scheherazade of the new Anti-Terror Age. Funny, unnerving, sophisticated, and dazzling in the range of its invention, THE EFFECT OF LIVING BACKWARDS is a terrific and important addition to our literature. — George Saunders