Still Alice

Lisa Genova’s first novel strikes a chord in over-50s who think they may be ‘losing it’

By line seven, I was hooked: “She’d just read the same sentence three times without comprehending it.” By the end of the first chapter, I was weeping for Alice. Knowing this book was about a woman turning fifty who discovers she has early- onset Alzheimer’s disease. I read on, wondering if this might be about me.

This extraordinary first novel by Lisa Genova is sensitively written from Alice’s own viewpoint of her journey into a scarily unknown world of dementia. A brilliant cognitive psychology professor at Harvard with an equally brilliant husband and three children, it is a story of love and despair, and love all over again, both from Alice’s viewpoint and that of her family.

I couldn’t put it down. I read it from cover to cover in four hours, with three glasses of wine and half a box of tissues. I implore you to read it.

(Tempo Toronto member) OliBeck

A ‘New York Times Bestseller’, published by Simon & Schuster in paperback January 2009. “Heartbreakingly real … So real, in fact, that it kept me from sleeping for several nights. I coudn’t put it down.” Brunonia Barry, author