Purchase

Amazon

Kindle

Barnes & Noble

Kobo

Apple Books

Google Play

Books-A-Million

Indie BookShop

Ripped Bodice

Add to Wish List

Also by Jillian Cantor:

The Season of Light and Darkness, August 2026
Hardcover / e-Book / audiobook
The May House, May 2026
Hardcover / e-Book
The Greatest Lie of All, December 2024
Trade Paperback / e-Book
The Fiction Writer, December 2023
Trade Paperback / e-Book
Beautiful Little Fools, February 2022
Paperback
Half Life, April 2021
Paperback / e-Book
The Code for Love and Heartbreak, October 2020
e-Book
In Another Time, March 2019
Paperback / e-Book
The Lost Letter, June 2018
Trade Size / e-Book (reprint)
The Transformation Of Things, November 2010
Paperback

HALF LIFE
By: Jillian Cantor

Harper Perennial
April 2021
On Sale: March 23, 2021
416 pages
ISBN: 0062969889
EAN: 9780062969880
Kindle: B08BLLTYFM
Paperback / e-Book
Add to Wish List

Non-Fiction Biography

The USA Today bestselling author of In Another Time reimagines the pioneering, passionate life of Marie Curie using a parallel structure to create two alternative timelines, one that mirrors her real life, one that explores the consequences for Marie and for science if she’d made a different choice.

In Poland in 1891, Marie Curie (then Marya Sklodowska) was engaged to a budding mathematician, Kazimierz Zorawski. But when his mother insisted she was too poor and not good enough, he broke off the engagement. A heartbroken Marya left Poland for Paris, where she would attend the Sorbonne to study chemistry and physics. Eventually Marie Curie would go on to change the course of science forever and be the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.But what if she had made a different choice?
 

What if she had stayed in Poland, married Kazimierz at the age of twenty-four, and never attended the Sorbonne or discovered radium? What if she had chosen a life of domesticity with a constant hunger for knowledge in Russian Poland where education for women was restricted, instead of studying science in Paris and meeting Pierre Curie?

Entwining Marie Curie’s real story with Marya Zorawska’s fictional one, Half Life explores loves lost and destinies unfulfilled—and probes issues of loyalty and identity, gender and class, motherhood and sisterhood, fame and anonymity, scholarship and knowledge. Through parallel contrasting versions of Marya’s life, Jillian Cantor’s unique historical novel asks what would have happened if a great scientific mind was denied opportunity and access to education. It examines how the lives of one remarkable woman and the people she loved – as well as the world at large and course of science and history—might have been irrevocably changed in ways both great and small.