Life Sciences (Sciences de la vie)

Ninon Moise is cursed. So is her mother Esther, as was every eldest female member of her family going back to the Middle Ages. Each generation is marked by a uniquely obscure disease, illness, or ailment--one of her ancestors was patient zero in the sixteenth-century dancing plague of Strasbourg, while Esther has a degenerative eye disease. Ninon grows up comforted & fascinated by the recitation of these bizarre, inexplicable medical mysteries, forewarned that something will happen to her, yet entirely unprepared for how it will alter her life. Her own entry into this litany of maladies appears one morning in the form of an excruciating burning sensation on her skin, from her wrists to her shoulders.

Embarking on a dizzying & frustrating cycle of doctors, specialists, procedures, needles, scans, & therapists, 17-year-old Ninon becomes consumed by her need to receive a diagnosis & find a cure for her ailment. She seeks to break the curse & reclaim her body by any means necessary, through increasing isolation & failed treatment after failed treatment, even as her life falls apart.

A provocative & empathic questioning of illness, remedy, transmission, & health, Life Sciences poignantly questions our reliance upon science, despite its limitations, to provide all the answers.

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Joy Sorman is a novelist & documentarian. Her first novel, Boys, boys, boys, was awarded the 2005 Prix de Flore. In 2013, she received the Prix François Mauriac from the Académie française for Comme une bête.

Lara Vergnaud is a literary translator from the French. She is the recipient of the 2019 French Voices Grand Prize & was a 2019 Best Translated Book Award finalist.