The Foursome: A Novel – A Sweeping Historical Fiction of Two Sisters and a Forgotten Chapter of American History

Mostly based on what happened to the sisters in the 19th century when they marry Siamese Twins. I had a hard time putting it down.

The Foursome is the strange-but-true story of two sisters in nineteenth-century North Carolina—Sarah and Adelaide Yates—who marry Eng and Chang Bunker, world-famous conjoined twins. Adelaide–Addie–is a manipulator who will do anything to get her way. Sarah–Sally–is naive and gullible, too eager to please, living in her sister’s shadow and craving her approval. Sisters know each other’s rough edges, but also every soft place. The Foursome is an invitation to witness the holy union, the intertwining of these two souls—Addie and Chang—and these two souls—Sally and Eng—into a tapestry, woven together and yet distinct. It’s hard enough building a life with one person much less trying to make it work with three. However, intimacy proves the least of their challenges. The true test would come in daily living—negotiating space and time, navigating four strong personalities, carving out a relationship with their husbands in a marriage and a household that would never truly be theirs alone–not a room, not even a bed—where they learned to find each other in a crowd of four. They lived a life no one else could fully comprehend forever bound together, even as their sensibilities, their beliefs, and their hearts pulled them in different directions. Through the tension they discovered something most people struggle to grasp: that family is both simpler and more complex than the neat lines society tries to draw around it. Their marriage allowed them to step outside their circumscribed existence, to evade its unyielding rules. Within the foursome, each comes to see the world differently. Together, their union affords each of them the opportunity to be part of something improbable. Like its real-life characters, Christina Baker Kline’s The Foursome is something extraordinary.