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Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley gay brilliant nerveracked miserable At the beginning of this novel she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin Judith to a nice young doctor from Connecticut Cassandra however is hellbent on sabotaging the wedding Dorothy Bakers entrancing tragicomic novella follows an unpredictable course of events in which her heroine appears variously as conniving selfaware pitiful frenzied absurd and heartbrokenat once utterly impossible and tremendously sympathetic As she struggles to come to terms with the only life she has Cassandra reckons with her complicated feelings about the sister who she feels owes it to her to be her alter ego with her father a brandysoaked retired professor of philosophy and with the ghost of her dead mother First published in 1962 Cassandra at the Wedding is a book of enduring freshness insight and verve Like the fiction of Jeffrey Eugenides and Jhumpa Lahiri it is the work of a master stylist with a profound understanding of the complexities of the heart and mind