We are all completely beside ourselves.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club presents a middle-class American family, ordinary in every way except one, in this novel, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.

Meet the Cook family: mom and dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, whose story starts in the middle. She has her reasons. “I grew up with a chimpanzee,” she explains. “I’m telling you, Fern was a chimpanzee, and indeed, you didn’t think of her as my sister. But until Fern was sent away… she was my twin, my playful mirror, my vibrant other half, and I loved her like a sister.” As a child, Rosemary never stopped talking. Then something happened, and Rosemary swathed herself in silence. In *We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves*, Karen Joy Fowler has woven her most successful work yet—a story about loving but fallible people, whose well-intentioned actions lead to heartbreaking consequences. “A captivating, big-hearted book… Through the tender voice of her heroine, Fowler has much to say about family, memory, language, science, and even the question of what constitutes a human being.” —Khaled Hosseini