Modern Gods

An award-winning author who writes with a wonderfully original and limber voice (The New York Times) a powerful, thought-provoking novel about two sisters who must reclaim themselves after their lives are dramatically upended Alison Donnelly has risked things for love, and suffered. Still stuck in the small Northern Ireland town of Ballyglass where she was born, working for her father s real estate agency, she hopes to pick up the pieces and get her life back together. Her older sister Liz, a prickly, fiercely independent college professor who lives in New York City, has just come home to find her boyfriend in bed with a man. Liz is about to return to Ballyglass for Alison s second wedding, before heading to an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea to make a TV show about the world s newest religion. Both sisters lives are about to be shaken apart. Alison wakes up the day after her wedding to find herself living in a nightmare, discovering on the front page of the paper that her new husband has a past neither of them can escape. In a rainforest on the other side of the planet, Liz finds herself becoming increasingly entangled in the eerie, charged world of Belef, the subject of her show, a charismatic middle-aged woman who is the leader of a cargo cult. Liz and Alison, as well as their parents Ken and Judith and their brother, Spencer, all find their lives wanting in some way. Laird s brave, original novel charts the intimacies and disappointments of a family trying to hold itself together, and the repercussions of trust, history, and faith in oneself."