Duplex: A Novel

by Kathryn Davis, Elisabeth Rodgers (Narrator)

Mary and Eddie are meant for each other - but love is no guarantee, not in these suburbs. Like all children, they exist in an eternal present; time is imminent, and the adults of the street live in their assorted houses like numbers on a clock. Meanwhile, ominous rumors circulate, and the increasing agitation of the neighbors points to a future in which all will be lost. Soon a sorcerer's car will speed down Mary's street, and as past and future fold into each other, the resonant parenthesis of her girlhood will close forever. Beyond is adulthood, a world of robots and sorcerers, slaves and masters, bodies without souls.

In Duplex, Kathryn Davis, whom the Chicago Tribune has called "one of the most inventive novelists at work today", has created a coming-of-age story like no other. Once you enter the duplex - that magical hinge between past and future, human and robot, space and time - there's no telling where you might come out.

Audible Audio

Published August 13, 2019

About the author

Kathryn Davis is an award-winning American novelist.

Davis has taught at Skidmore College, and is now senior fiction writer in the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

She is a recipient of the Kafka Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 2006.

Davis lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with her husband, the novelist and essayist Eric Zencey.