The Condition, Jennifer Haigh
The Condition, Jennifer Haigh
12 Rating(s)
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The Condition

Author: Jennifer Haigh

Narrator: Jennifer Van Dyck

Unabridged: 14 hr 9 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 07/01/2008


Synopsis

The Condition tells the story of the McKotches, a proper New England family that comes apart during one fateful summer. The year is 1976, and the family has embarked on their annual vacation to Cape Cod. One day, Frank is struck by his thirteen-year-old daughter, Gwen, standing a full head shorter than her younger cousin. At that moment he knows something is terribly wrong with his only daughter.Twenty years after Gwen's diagnosis with Turner's Syndrome—a genetic condition that traps her forever in the body of a child—all five family members are still dealing with the fallout. Frank and Paulette are acrimoniously divorced. Billy is dutiful but distant. His brother, Scott, awakens from a pot-addled adolescence to a soul-killing job and a regrettable marriage. And Gwen is silent and emotionally aloof, until she falls in love for the first time. And suddenly, once again, the family's world is tilted on its axis. Compassionate yet unflinchingly honest, witty and almost painfully astute, The Condition explores the power of family mythologies.

About Jennifer Haigh

Jennifer Haigh is the author of the short-story collection News from Heaven and six bestselling and critically acclaimed novels, including Mrs. Kimble, Faith and Heat and Light, which was named a Best Book of 2016 by the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and NPR. Her books have won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN New England Award in Fiction, and have been translated widely. She lives in New England.

About Jennifer Van Dyck

Jennifer Van Dyck has starred on and off Broadway, in such films as The Contender and Bullets Over Broadway, and on television in Law & Order and Spin City.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Bess on July 29, 2008

This novel is really wonderful in the same way that Pink Floyd is really wonderful... but you know how if you listen to Pink Floyd alone on a cloudy day, you'll spiral into a bone-chillingly real, suicidal depression? All the while consciously maintaining that it's fantastically beautiful music, and......more

Goodreads review by Will on February 26, 2014

The flap copy states that the core event in the book is Gwen’s “condition,” but I did not really get that from reading the book. Her medical condition is one of several conditions addressed in the book, emotional conditions, maybe the “human condition.” This is a domestic novel, a multi-generational......more

Goodreads review by Blondish And on December 29, 2019

This is a book about a family that is slightly dysfunctional—that is to say, a normal family. One of the main characters is Gwen, who has the genetic disease Turner's Syndrome, which keeps her in the body of a pre adolescent. First, the good: many books with a character like Gwen would have gone for......more