Half Life

Jillian Cantor, who also wrote In Another Time, takes on the life of Marie Curie in this novel. It moves along two tracks at once: the life Curie actually lived, and an imagined version shaped by a different set of decisions.

The story opens in Poland in 1891, where Marya Sklodowska is engaged to Kazimierz Zorawski, a young mathematician. His mother decides that Marya has too little money and is not good enough for her son, and he ends the engagement. Marya leaves for Paris to study chemistry and physics at the Sorbonne. In the real timeline, she becomes Marie Curie, transforms the direction of science for good, and is the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.

The second timeline asks what would have happened had she stayed in Poland. In this version she marries Kazimierz at twenty-four and never studies at the Sorbonne or discovers radium. Instead she lives a domestic life in Russian Poland, where women's schooling is tightly limited, and her hunger for learning goes unsatisfied. The alternate path replaces Paris and her meeting with Pierre Curie.

By weaving Curie's true story together with that of the invented Marya Zorawska, the novel explores lost romance and ambitions left unrealized. It also takes up loyalty, identity, gender, class, motherhood, sisterhood, fame versus anonymity, and the pursuit of knowledge. Two contrasting versions of one woman's life sit side by side, raising the question of what might have followed had a brilliant scientific mind been denied schooling and opportunity. The book considers how the people close to her, the wider world, and the course of science and history could have shifted in ways both large and small.