Indivisible by Two: Lives of Extraordinary Twins (Hardback)

See catalogue number 26740 for the paperback edition. A leading expert on twins delves into the stories behind her research to reveal the profound joys and real-life traumas of twelve remarkable sets of twins, triplets, and quadruplets. Indivisible by Two introduces us to an assortment of memorable characters, from the 'Fireman Twins' - brothers who, though reared separately, are astonishingly similar in personality and behavioural traits - to the twin sisters who overcame one twin's infertility by having the other serve as her surrogate mother. We meet one of the few identical brother-sister pairs in the world after one of two sisters was surgically transformed into a man, and identical triplet brothers, only one of whom is gay while the others are straight. We see uniquely blended families - identical twin brothers marrying identical twin sisters, and Chinese twins adopted by different Canadian families yet raised as sisters. Being a twin can also render the experience of historical tragedy uniquely painful.We meet Stepha and Annetta, survivors of Josef Mengele's heinous experiments in Auschwitz, and untangle the troubled lifelong tie between Jack and Oskar, born