The Foursome
A Novel
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- ¥500
発行者による作品情報
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Christina Baker Kline comes a boldly original reimagining of the astonishing true story of two sisters in nineteenth-century North Carolina — Kline’s own distant relatives — who married world-famous conjoined twins from Siam.
When Eng and Chang Bunker arrive in Wilkes County in 1839, they’re not just a curiosity—they’re a sensation. Everyone is eager to learn whether the salacious rumors about them are true. Within months, the twins have opened a general store, bought land, and begun building a plantation. Now, word has it, they’re looking for wives—and in a place that thrives on gossip and legacy, their ambitions set the community on edge.
Sarah and Adelaide Yates, daughters of a once-prominent local family brought low by scandal, are drawn into their orbit. Bold, beautiful Adelaide sees in the twins’ fame a chance to reclaim her future. Sarah, quiet and observant, isn’t so sure. When the twins’ lives become entangled with theirs, they must navigate loyalty, longing, and identity in a world where everything—including race, class, and gender—is rigidly defined.
Spanning five decades and unfolding against the backdrop of a fractured nation hurtling toward war, The Foursome is both intimate and epic: a story of love and constraint, identity and reinvention. With piercing insight and emotional precision, Kline brings to life a forgotten chapter of American history and the complex, boundary-defying marriages at its center.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Orphan Train author Kline offers a daring and deeply empathetic tale of the sisters who married conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker (1811–1874). Immigrants from Siam, Chang and Eng respectively marry Addie and Sallie Yates, distant relatives of the author, in 1843 Wilkes County, N.C. Sallie, who narrates the novel, is more reserved and tentative than her outgoing younger sister and has a hard time with their new domestic arrangement (the four share a bed), which she describes in clear but not prurient detail ("Even the most extraordinary life feels ordinary when you're living it"). The novel follows them through the decades on their plantation in North Carolina, as the two women give birth to a total of 21 children. Kline uses their unusual circumstances to cast a light on the pressures of marriage and sisterhood as Sallie begins to assert her own identity and starts to question the institution of slavery, which the other three take for granted. Avoiding sensationalism and hewing closely to the historical record, Kline subtly and often poetically documents the small, daily choices that shape these lives. It's remarkable.
