"Heartrending and intelligent, Luminous Bodies is a beautiful biographical novel about a daughter, wife, mother, lover, immigrant, and scientist who was more than the sum of her parts."
—Foreword Reviews

"In Luminous Bodies, Devon Jersild’s sweeping, psychologically penetrating fiction about Marie Curie, the intimate details of Curie’s life are so compelling, and so rooted in character, that the reader becomes Marie, the woman behind the famous name. I find myself thinking about this character, musing over certain moments in the novel, replaying dialogue and description in my head. It’s what I do to prolong a story that I don’t want to end, and that I want to place in other people’s hands."
—Julia Alvarez, author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies

"Devon Jersild’s writing vibrates with a unique energy. Her Luminous Bodies shows us how life’s difficulties and contradictions can also light us with passionate possibilities."
—Ann Beattie, author of Onlookers and The New Yorker Stories

“Devon Jersild’s beautiful novel is alchemic, bringing Marie Curie—the scientist, the lover, the mother, the immigrant, the Nobel Laureate—to life. This tense, moving, and riveting story burns hot: it’s historical fiction at its very best.”
—Chris Bohjalian, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Flight Attendant and Hour of the Witch

"With a gimlet eye, Jersild . . . spotlight[s] the double standards to which male and female scientists were held and the way Curie, understandably devastated by her treatment by journalists and the public, managed to pull herself back into her research and new discoveries through the force of her will. A colorful re-creation of an incomparable life."
—Kirkus Reviews