Half Life: A Novel

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.