We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

In this novel we meet the Cooke family. Our narrator is Rosemary Cooke. As a child, she never stopped talking; as a young woman, she has wrapped herself in silence: the silence of intentional forgetting, of protective cover. Something happened, something so awful she has buried it in the recesses of her mind. It changed Rosemary and it destroyed her family. Now her older brother is a fugitive, wanted by the FBI for domestic terrrorism. And her once lively mother is a shell of her former self; her clever and imperious father now a distant, brooding man. And Fern her sister, an endearing chimpanzee, her accomplice in all their childhood mischief, has come to a far more terrible fate than their family could ever have imagined. -- From book jacket.