Act of God

Brooklyn, the summer of 2015. The city is sweltering from another record-breaking heatwave, accompanied by biblical rains, and now a mysteriously glowing mushroom infestation is threatening the city. As the HAZMAT squad descends, identical twin sisters Edith, a recently retired librarian, and Kat, a feckless romantic who mistakes her own eccentricity for originality, are evacuated from their terraced house alongside their landlady and a Russian interloper, caught in a centrifugal nightmare. And as the mould spreads from house to house, frightened and bewildered New Yorkers wonder whether this plague on all their houses is an act of God…Part horror story, part screwball comedy, Act of God considers what happens when our lives – so seemingly set and ordered yet so precariously balanced – break down in the wake of calamity. It is, also, a novel about love found in the most unlikely circumstances.