Chang and Eng

This stunning novel combines fiction with astonishing fact to tell the story of history's most famous conjoined twins.

Born in Siam in 1811--on a squalid houseboat on the Mekong River--Chang and Eng Bunker were international celebrities before the age of twenty. Touring the world's stages as a circus act, they settled in the American South just prior to the Civil War. They eventually married two sisters from North Carolina, fathering twenty-one children between them, and lived for more than six decades never more than seven inches apart, attached at the chest by a small band of skin and cartilage.

Woven from the fabric of fact, myth, and imagination, Strauss's narrative gives poignant, articulate voice to these legendary brothers, and humanizes the freakish legend that grew up around them. Sweeping from the Far East and the court of the King of Siam to the shared intimacy of their lives in America, Chang and Eng rescues one of the nineteenth century's most fabled human oddities from the sideshow of history, drawing from their extraordinary lives a novel of exceptional power and beauty.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Adult Hc/Tr
Published: 05/01/2001
ISBN: 9780452281097
Pages: 336
Weight: 0.78lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.31w x 0.70d

Review Citations: Booklist 04/01/2001 pg. 1461
New York Times 09/09/2001 pg. 32

Accelerated Reader Quiz #/Name: 49818 / Chang and Eng: A Novel
Reading Level: 6.8 / Interest Level: Upper Grade / Point Value: 19