Egg Dancing

Here is the perfect novel for everyone who ever felt manipulated and lied to in a relationship, for everyone who ever thought they were sane and it was the doctors and psychiatrists who should be locked up, for everyone who ever wished for the perfect, low-maintenance baby, and for everyone who ever had doubts about how far medical science should go - regardless of how far it could go. "Jensen has a fine comic ear ... her send-ups are spot-on." - The TimesMoira Sugden, a long-term resident of the Manxheath Institute of Challenged Stability, and her daughters Hazel and Linda are the ideal dysfunctional family. Hazel's husband Gregory is a gynecologist who is developing a "perfect baby" drug by experimenting on both his unsuspecting wife and his complicit mistress; Hazel's 4-year-old son - a result of Gregory's experiments - is communicating telepathically with his institutionalized grandmother; and Hazel's sister Linda has become a groupie of a seductive televangelist. "An assured, hilarious and insightful novel...propelled along by the comic rhythm of the writing, you’re carried on a crazy journey you won’t be sorry you took." - Time OutWhen Hazel finally learns the awful truth about her husband's research, she joins forces with her mother and sister to get even with the men who are controlling their lives. A piercingly funny and blackly ironic revenge on genetic engineering and the born-again church. With only a schizophrenic mother and a militantly hostile sister for backup, Hazel Sugden, food-splattered mum and queen of low self-esteem, is palpably unfit to save the future of mankind as we know it. But when embryology, psychiatry and religion clash over the miracle designer drug Genetic Choice, the dysfunctional trio are propelled into action with explosively comic results.... Liz Jensen is the author of Egg Dancing (long-listed for the Orange Prize), Ark Baby (shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and long-listed for the Orange Prize), The Paper Eater, War Crimes for the Home (long-listed for the Orange Prize), and The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, currently in development as a major motion picture by Anthony Minghella. She divides her time between Copenhagen and London.