What It Takes to Be Human, the haunting new novel by Orange Prize–shortlisted author Marilyn Bowering, considers the life of Sandy Grey, an idealistic young air cadet who wants nothing more than to enlist in the Second World War. Sandy's father, a fundamentalist preacher, refuses to grant his son's request, fearing that the world is living its very last days. When Sandy's attempts to oppose his father turn violent, the novel takes a dramatic shift in setting into the fragmented world of an asylum for the criminally insane. Bowering pushes her characters to the very fringe of civilization, love and sanity during the darkening days of a distant conflict to expose the acute parallels between their lives and the lives of those being torn apart by war.

Marilyn Bowering is an award-winning novelist, poet and playwright whose first novel, To All Appearances a Lady, was a New York Times Notable Book. Her second novel, Visible Worlds, was shortlisted for the prestigious Orange Prize, nominated for the Dublin IMPAC Prize and awarded the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.

Bowering was born in Winnipeg and grew up in Victoria, B.C. She has lived in the United States, Greece, Scotland, Spain and Canada, and now makes her home in Sooke, British Columbia.