Lives of the Twins

In this “truly rare book” (The New York Times) an attractive young woman imagines herself autonomous and self-sufficient, only to discover that she is unwittingly entrapped in “the lives of the twins.”

Molly Marks can’t make up her mind. Switching plans of study, bouncing from job to job, she feels lost. But all that might change when she begins a relationship with a young psychiatrist. Handsome, successful, and caring, Jonathan is the first person (apart from herself) Molly has ever cared deeply about. There’s just one sliver of doubt: Jonathan’s refusal to talk about his twin brother. Determined to uncover the reason behind his silence, Molly arranges a secret meeting with the estranged brother named James, also a psychiatrist.

After this reckless act, Molly embarks on a dangerous double life as her relationship with both brothers becomes more and more tangled. She questions whether she can trust either man—or even herself. The first mystery novel Joyce Carol Oates wrote using the pen name Rosamond smith, Lives of the Twins is a suspenseful psychological thriller with a dark family secret at its center.

Joyce Carol Oates is the author most recently of the novel A Book of American Martyrs and the story collection DIS MEM BER. She is a recipient of the National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal, the PEN/Malamud Award in Short Fiction, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN America, among other honors. She has been a professor at Princeton University for many years and is currently Visiting Distinguished Writer in Residence in the Graduate Writing Program at New York University; in the spring term she is Visiting Professor of English at University of California, Berkeley. Her forthcoming novel is Hazards of Time Travel.