The Speed of Life

What happens when a brutal crime threatens a mother's love for her son? An old Florida family and those in their orbit get caught in a torrent of passion, a deadly legal system, and the mythology of the Everglades, which runs as deep as this story does. Propulsive, engaging, evocative, beautiful writing.

Estella Verus - part Seminole, part black, part white - a federal prosecutor in South Florida, is the victim of a home invasion during which she is savagely beaten. The perpetrator leaves a note saying that Estella's son, Andrew, sent him to do it. When Andrew is charged with complicity in the crime, Estella is desperate to talk to him in her efforts to discover the truth, but while she's still in the hospital recovering from her injuries, Andrew's lawyer has her served with a restraining order, preventing her from talking to him to protect his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Thus begins The Speed of Life, literary fiction told through multiple plots by multiple narrators, mirroring the structure of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad.

A search for the truth of whether or not Andrew sent the intruder to harm his mother is the central plot, but it overlaps other storylines, each exploring the novel's theme: How can we know what is real and what is just? These should be questions at the heart of every trial but The Speed of Life takes these questions further, exploring them in contexts beyond the law, including romantic love, familial love, neighborly love, shamanism and even astrophysics as the story involves real science, as does The Martian, by Andy Weir and math, philosophy, and the history of science as in the novels of Neal Stephenson.

T. C. Boyle, Kip Thorne, Tom Holland, Madison Smartt Bell, and Aram Saroyan have read the novel and written blurbs. T. C. Boyle says of The Speed of Life that it is a "thoroughly enjoyable triumph of a first novel." Professor Thorne credits The Speed of Life with "solid astrophysics." Kirkus Reviews has reviewed the manuscript calling it "impressive" and that "Descriptions . . . are primarily images that Jordan sears onto the pages."