Louisa Hall – författare

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.

She cannot run. She cannot walk. She cannot even blink. As her batteries run down for the final time, all she can do is speak. Will you listen?From a pilgrim girl''s diary, to a traumatised child talking to a software program; from Alan Turing''s conviction in the 1950s, to a genius imprisoned in 2040 for creating illegally lifelike dolls: all these lives have shaped and changed a single artificial intelligence - MARY3. In Speak she tells you their story, and her own. It is the last story she will ever tell, spoken both in celebration and in warning.When machines learn to speak, who decides what it means to be human? ''TRANSFIXING''New York Times''BRILLIANT''Huffington Post''INCREDIBLE''Buzzfeed''HYPNOTIC''Guardian''A MASTERPIECE''NPR

''Brilliant . . . Hall has shaped a richly imagined, tremendously moving fictional work. Its genius is not to explain but to embody the science and politics that shaped Oppenheimer''s life . . .The resulting quantum portrait feels both true and dazzlingly unfamiliar'' New York Times J. Robert Oppenheimer - the father of the atomic bomb - was a brilliant scientist, a champion of liberal causes, and a complex and often contradictory character. In Louisa Hall''s kaleidoscopic novel, seven fictional characters bear witness to his life. 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 Trinity, Louisa Hall has crafted an explosive story about what it means to truly know someone, and about the secrets we keep from the world and from ourselves.