Half the Kingdom

Joe Bernstine is dying. Fans of Segal's books may remember Joe as the director of a think tank in her previous collection of interconnected short stories, Shakespeare's Kitchen, short-listed for a Pulitzer Prize. Joe is working on a project to catalog "end of the world" scenarios. He's hired his daughter Bethy, an old friend Lucy Friedgold, Lucy's son Benedict, and a computer whiz named Al. Nothing, however, goes as planned. Joe ends up in a hospital where there seems to be an epidemic of perfectly sane seniors developing dementia within hours of arrival. Is this a terrorist plot? Is it something the hospital is doing? Segal artfully connects the stories of several individuals' lives into a patchwork quilt of the elderly trying to survive their last days, dealing with their children and grandchildren, holding grudges, and then letting them go.