While everyone else may be fooled, psychiatrist Leo Liebenstein knows better. His wife is not his wife. She is a dead-ringer—a doppelganger—but something is very wrong. This isn’t Rema. Could it be that his wife is involved in some infidelity? But why would infidelity lead to disappearance? Or false appearance? With nothing for Leo to go on except a potential clue relating to one of his patients, Harvey—a man who believes he is a secret agent with control over the weather—Leo sets off on a humorous and science-steeped odyssey to unravel the mystery of his missing wife and to resolve Harvey’s “conflict with the consensus view of reality.” Moving from New York City to the southern reaches of Patagonia, Atmospheric Disturbances is a brilliantly inventive and addictive adventure, mixed with a scientific exploration of the uncontested truths we know are false.

Rivka Galchen received her MD with a focus in psychiatry from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. She recently completed her master of fine arts at Columbia University, where she was a Robert Bingham Fellow. She has published essays in The Believer and Scientific American, and in 2006 she was awarded a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Atmospheric Disturbances is her first novel and will be published in Canada, the U.S., Europe and Asia. Rivka Galchen was born in Toronto and now lives in New York City. Visit her at www.galchen.net.

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