The Colony

Publishers Weekly praises this debut novel by Texan poet Jillian Weise as “ambitious, provocative, and wildly inventive.” It’s 2015, and Anne Hatley is leaving her North Carolina home for a Long Island research lab called the Colony. Anne, who was born with a genetic mutation that left her only one leg, will be donating stem cells for gene research in exchange for a new leg. But after meeting others with deficiencies, including carriers of the “suicide gene” and “obesity gene,” Anne questions how much genetics really determine a person’s life.