OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEAR
ONE OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEAR
PEOPLE’S #1 BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
ONE OF GQ‘s TOP 50 BOOKS OF LITERARY JOURNALISM IN THE 21st CENTURY
Named a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, TIME, Slate, Smithsonian, The New York Post, and Amazon

The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science’s great hope in the quest to understand the disease.

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don’s work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins–aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony–and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family?

What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations.

With clarity and compassion, bestselling and award-winning author Robert Kolker uncovers one family’s unforgettable legacy of suffering, love, and hope.

Doce hermanos, seis diagnosticados con esquizofrenia. Una tragedia familiar, la gran esperanza de la ciencia para entender la enfermedad N.º 1 de la lista de libros más vendidos del New York Times Don y Mimi Galvin encarnan como nadie el espíritu ingenuo y entusiasta de los Estados Unidos de su época. Jóvenes y llenos de sueños y ambiciones, el futuro es para ellos un horizonte abierto. Los hijos no tardan en llegar: en 1945 nace Donald, el primero de los doce que tendrá la pareja a lo largo de dos décadas. Atléticos, inteligentes, talentosos, atractivos y felizmente instalados en la idílica casa de Hidden Valley Road, los Galvin se dirían la perfecta familia americana. Hasta que un día, tras una serie de extraños comportamientos, diagnostican esquizofrenia a Donald. En los años sucesivos, nada menos que otros cinco de los chicos de Hidden Valley Road desarrollarán la enfermedad, y la amenaza siempre penderá sobre la cabeza del resto. Pese a que su singular caso llegará a llamar la atención del Instituto Nacional de Salud Mental, Mimi se pasará media vida tratando de mantener la impoluta fachada de familia modélica e intachable, mientras de puertas adentro la desdicha y el horror no hacen sino acrecentarse: crisis nerviosas, episodios de violencia descontrolada, secretos abominables… Los chicos de Hidden Valley Road es una portentosa crónica con un pulso narrativo tan sólido y adictivo que se lee como una novela: una saga familiar llena de amor, sufrimiento y esperanza que se desarrolla en paralelo no solo a los grandes episodios de la historia estadounidense del siglo xx, sino también a los avances en la visión, comprensión y tratamiento de la esquizofrenia. El libro de Kolker es una lectura apasionante que nos habla de la tragedia de una familia devorada por la esquizofrenia en una época en la que nadie sabía demasiado bien qué era: ni los doctores, ni los investigadores, ni mucho menos los Galvin.

New York Times Bestseller * Now a Netflix Film

The bestselling account of the lives of five young women whose fates converged in the perplexing case of the Long Island Serial Killer.

“Rich, tragic…monumental…true-crime reporting at its best.”–Washington Post

One late spring evening in 2010, Shannan Gilbert–after running through the oceanfront community of Oak Beach screaming for her life–went missing. No one who had heard of her disappearance thought much about what had happened to the twenty-four-year-old: she was a Craigslist escort who had been fleeing a scene–of what, no one could be sure. The Suffolk County police, too, seemed to have paid little attention–until seven months later, when an unexpected discovery in a bramble alongside a nearby highway turned up four bodies, all evenly spaced, all wrapped in burlap. But none of them Shannan’s.

There was Maureen Brainard-Barnes, last seen at Penn Station in Manhattan three years earlier, and Melissa Barthelemy, last seen in the Bronx in 2009. There was Megan Waterman, last seen leaving a hotel in Hauppauge, Long Island, just a month after Shannon’s disappearance in 2010, and Amber Lynn Costello, last seen leaving a house in West Babylon a few months later that same year. Like Shannan, all four women were petite, in their twenties, and had come from out of town to work as escorts, and they all had advertised on Craigslist and its competitor, Backpage.

Long considered “one of the best true-crime books of all time” (Time), Lost Girls is a portrait of unsolved murders in an idyllic part of America, of the underside of the Internet, and of the secrets we keep without admitting to ourselves that we keep them.