My Life as a Silent Movie A Novel [Paperback]

After losing her husband and daughter in an auto accident, 42-year-old Emma flies to Paris, discovers she has a twin brother whose existence she had not known about, and learns that her birth parents weren't the Americans who raised her, but a White Russian film star of the 1920s and a French Stalinist. A story about identity and the shaping function of art, My Life as a Silent Movie presents a vividly rendered world and poses provocative questions on the relationship of art to life.

In this finely-wrought odyssey of reconstructing a life while tracing birth parents, Kercheval's prose reads like woof scuttling feverishly to fill in the warp.Winner, 2013 Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers2013 Wisconsin Library Association Literary Awards Outstanding Achievement RecognitionFinalist, 2014 Binghampton University John Gardner Fiction Book AwardA beautiful, evocative novel. . . Kercheval has that rare ability to bring a number of characters alive simultaneously on the page, to make us care about each one for their quirkiness, their hard luck stories and their equally hard-won wisdom. Readers will embrace this story as it melds the magic of old movies with the redemptive power of family.?An original, poignant, and truly irresistible story for our time.Wildly entertaining, fascinating, and deeply moving, My Life as a Silent Movie will make you fall in love all over again with Paris, the history of silent cinema, and the enduring, mysterious drama of being alive. I did not want it to end.Jesse Lee Kercheval's precise and sharp new novel?My Life as a Silent Movie shows us what happens in the wake of an unimaginable tragedy. Kercheval's prose is as clear as a silent film star's face, and the novel's twists and turns are wonderfully unexpected. Whether in Paris or in Indiana, readers will swoon.Kercheval . . . blends fiction with fact in this often tense page turner. The books energy is by turns bleak and frenetic, and Kercheval deftly l£.