The impossible lives of Greta Wells

A rapturously romantic story of a woman who finds herself transported to the "other lives" she might have lived. It is 1985. After the death of her beloved twin brother, Felix, and the abandonment of her long-time lover, Nathan, Greta Wells embarks on a radical psychiatric treatment to alleviate her...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Greer, Andrew Sean
Format: Books Print Book
Language:English
Published: New York : Ecco, c2013.
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Online Access:Go to Downloadable eBook Here.
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Summary:A rapturously romantic story of a woman who finds herself transported to the "other lives" she might have lived. It is 1985. After the death of her beloved twin brother, Felix, and the abandonment of her long-time lover, Nathan, Greta Wells embarks on a radical psychiatric treatment to alleviate her suffocating depression and undergoes electroshock therapy. Over the course of the treatment, Greta finds herself repeatedly sent to 1918, 1941, and back to the present. Whisked from the gas-lit streets and horse-drawn carriages of the West Village to a martini-fueled lunch at the Oak Room, in these other worlds, Greta finds her brother alive and well--though fearfully masking his true personality. And her former lover is now her devoted husband...but will he be unfaithful to her in this life as well? Greta Wells is fascinated by her alter egos: in 1941, she is a devoted mother; in 1918, she is a bohemian adulteress. Separated by time and social mores, Greta's three lives are remarkably similar, fraught with familiar tensions and difficult choices. Each reality has its own losses, its own rewards, and each extracts a different price. And the modern Greta learns that her alternate selves are unpredictable, driven by their own desires and needs. As her final treatment looms, questions arise: What will happen once each Greta learns how to remain in one of the other worlds? Who will choose to stay in which life? In this spellbinding novel by Andrew Sean Greer, each reality has its own losses, its own rewards; each extracts a different price. Which life will she choose as she wrestles with the unpredictability of love and the consequences of even her most carefully considered choices? The author beautifully imagines "what if" and wondrously wrestles with the impossibility of what could be.--from Amazon.com
Physical Description:289 p. : ill., maps ; 24 cm.
ISBN:9780062213785 :
0062213784
Author Notes:Andrew Sean Greer was born in Washington, D.C. on November 5, 1970. He received a bachelor's degree from Brown University and a master of fine arts degree from the University of Montana. His collections of stories, How It Was for Me, was published in 2000. His novels include The Path of Minor Planets, The Story of a Marriage, and The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells. The Confessions of Max Tivoli received the California Book Award and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award for an author under 35 and Less received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2018.

(Bowker Author Biography)