Matters of Chance

This searing novel, a National Book Award finalist, “transforms one woman’s experience with cancer into a work of vision and intelligence” ( The Washington Post ). “I am thirty-four years old, married, a professor of neurobiology; I have two sons, aged nine and seven. I grew up in Brownsville and I left it behind, and I was diagnosed as having cancer in January. I know that these facts are connected; I have yet to understand how.” Mona’s perfect world is shattered by sudden and serious illness—l