Atmospheric Disturbances - Couverture souple

While everyone else may be fooled, psychiatrist Leo Liebenstein knows better. His wife is not his wife. She is a dead-ringer—a doppelganger—but something is very wrong. This isn’t Rema. Could it be that his wife is involved in some infidelity? But why would infidelity lead to disappearance? Or false appearance? With nothing for Leo to go on except a potential clue relating to one of his patients, Harvey—a man who believes he is a secret agent with control over the weather—Leo sets off on a humorous and science-steeped odyssey to unravel the mystery of his missing wife and to resolve Harvey’s “conflict with the consensus view of reality.” Moving from New York City to the southern reaches of Patagonia, Atmospheric Disturbances is a brilliantly inventive and addictive adventure, mixed with a scientific exploration of the uncontested truths we know are false.

RIVKA GALCHEN is a recipient of a William Saroyan International Prize for Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a Berlin Prize, among other distinctions. She writes regularly for The New Yorker, which selected her for its list of 20 under 40 American fiction writers in 2010. Her debut novel, the critically acclaimed Atmospheric Disturbances, was published in 2008.