Jill Ciment was born in Montreal, Canada. She has received many grants and awards, among them a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship. She is a professor at the University of Florida. Vanity Fair calls her latest novel, The Body in Question (Pantheon), “An unnerving, elegant page-turner.” The place: central Florida. The situation: a sensational murder trial, set in a courthouse more Soviet than Le Corbusier; a rich, white teenage girl—a twin—on trial for murdering her toddler brother. Two of the jurors: Hannah, a married fifty-two-year-old former Rolling Stone and Interview Magazine photographer, and Graham, a forty-one-year-old anatomy professor. Both are sequestered along with the other jurors. As the shocking details of the crime are revealed over a string of days and long courtroom hours, and the nights play out in a series of court-financed meals at Outback Steak House and Red Lobster, Hannah and Graham fall into a furtive affair, keeping their oath as jurors never to discuss the trial. During deliberations, the lovers learn that they are on opposing sides of the case. Suddenly they look at one another through an altogether different lens, as things become more complicated . . .
