书名：I Know This Much Is True  我知道这是真的

作者：Wally Lamb

出版社名称：Harper Perennial

出版时间：2008

语种：英文 

ISBN：9780061469084

商品尺寸：13.5 x 3.8 x 20.3 cm

包装：平装

页数：928

I Know This Much Is True《我知道这是真的》是美国作家Wally Lamb的畅销小说，入选《奥普拉读书俱乐部》（Oprah’s Book Club）。本书被称为“史诗般的家庭传奇故事”，聚焦孪生兄弟Dominick与Thomas Birdsey之间的故事，关于身份的探索与人性的挖掘。根据小说改编的HBO同名电视剧将由“绿巨人”马克·鲁法洛主演，预计2019年上映。 On the afternoon of October 12, 1990, my twin brother, Thomas, entered the Three Rivers, Connecticut, public library, retreated to one of the rear study carrels, and prayed to God the sacrifice he was about to commit would be deemed acceptable. . . One of the most acclaimed novels of our time, Wally Lamb's I Know This Much Is True is a story of alienation and connection, devastation and renewal, at once joyous, heartbreaking, poignant, mystical, and powerfully, profoundly human. Review‘A triumph of simple beauty’--Time ‘I Know This Much Is True never grapples with anything less than life’s biggest questions… a modern-day Dostoyevsky’--New York Times ‘Every now and then a book comes along that sets new standards for writers and readers alike. Wally Lamb’s latest novel is stunning – and even that might be an understatement’ --Associated Press ‘Lamb creates a nuanced picture of a flawed but decent man. And the questions that permeate the novel… contribute to a fully developed and triumphantly resolved exploration of one man’s suffering and redemption’--Publishers Weekly

I Know This Much Is True《我知道这是真的》背景设定在20世纪康涅狄格州的三河，Dominick的兄弟Thomas患有妄想型精神分裂症，通过药物治疗，他能正常在咖啡店工作，但病情时不时会发作。Thomas认为他能做出反抗牺牲来阻止中东战争，在一所公立图书馆割断了自己的右手。Dominick看透了他并没有将手接回去的打算，代表他将他从一所压抑的、治疗危险精神病患者的医院释放……

Wally Lamb is the author of five New York Times bestselling novels: She’s Come Undone, I Know This Much Is True, The Hour I First Believed, Wishin’ and Hopin’, and We Are Water. His first two works of fiction, She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, were both #1 New York Times bestsellers and selections of Oprah’s Book Club. Lamb edited Couldn’t Keep It to Myself and I’ll Fly Away, two volumes of essays from students in his writing workshop at York Correctional Institution, a women’s prison in Connecticut, where he has been a volunteer facilitator for seventeen years.

On the afternoon of October 12, 1990, my twin brother Thomas entered the Three Rivers, Connecticut Public Library, retreated to one of the rear study carrels, and prayed to God the sacrifice he was about to commit would be deemed acceptable. Mrs. Theresa Fenneck, the children’s librarian, was officially in charge that day because the head librarian was at an all-day meeting in Hartford. She approached my brother and told him he’d have to keep his voice down or else leave the library. She could hear him all the way up at the front desk. There were other patrons to consider. If he wanted to pray, she told him, he should go to a church, not the 1ibrary Thomas and I had spent several hours together the day before. Our Sunday afternoon ritual dictated that I sign him out of the state hospital’s Settle Building, treat him to lunch, visit our stepfather or take him for a drive, and then return him to the hospital before suppertime. At a back booth at Friendly’s, I’d sat across from my brother, breathing in his secondary smoke and leafing for the umpteenth time through his scrapbook of clippings on the Persian Gulf crisis. He’d been collecting them since August as evidence that Armageddon was at hand—that the final battle between good and evil was about to be triggered. “America’s been living on borrowed time all these years, Dominick,” he told me. “Playing the world’s whore, wallowing in our greed. Now we’re going to pay the price.” He was oblivious of my drumming fingers on the tabletop. “Not to change the subject,” I said, “but how’s the coffee business?” Ever since eight milligrams of Haldol per day had quieted Thomas’s voices, he had managed a small morning concession in the patients’ lounge—coffee and cigarettes and newspapers dispensed from a metal cart more rickety than his emotional state. Like so many of the patients there, he indulged in caffeine and nicotine, but it was the newspapers that had become Thomas’s most potent addiction. “How can we kill people for the sake of cheap oil? How can we justify that?” His hands flapped as he talked; his palms were grimy from newsprint ink. Those dirty hands should have warned me— should have tipped me off. “How are we going to prevent God’s vengeance if we have that little respect for human life?”