The Chalk Artist

In exquisite detail, Goodman explores what happens when an alternate reality takes over one boy's life, and the forces at work behind his obsession: the all-encompassing gaming realm that becomes more authentic than his real world. Aidan and his twin sister Diana live with their mother in a small American town, which is dominated by the gaming company Arkadia. By day, Aidan goes to school, struggles with his friendships, does his homework as all normal teenagers do. But by night, he is a champion fighter, at the top of Arkadia's EverWhen gaming world. When he is mysteriously sent a small black BoX, which physically takes him into that world, the reality and perceptions of his two lives start dangerously to shift. Nina, Aidan's English teacher and the daughter of Arkadia's owner, suspects that something is wrong and wants to help, but she has her own demons to deal with. The love of her life, Collin, is being pulled further into the clutches of EverWhen - when the two worlds collide, everyone involved will have to decide where their loyalties actually lie.

Allegra Goodman's novels include Intuition, and The Cookbook Collector. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, amongst others, and her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The Boston Globe, and The American Scholar. Goodman studied initially at Harvard and received a PhD in English literature from Stanford. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, the Salon Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced study. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.