The Gold Bug Variations

Description

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory, an enthralling story about desire, new love and the mysteries of science An enthralling story about desire, new love and the mysteries of science from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory Stuart Ressler, a brilliant biologist, sets out in 1957 to crack the genetic code. His efforts are sidetracked by other, more intractable codes - social, moral, musical, spiritual - and he falls in love with a member of his research team. Years later, another young man and woman team up to investigate a different mystery - why did the eminently promising Ressler suddenly disappear from the world of science? Strand by strand, these two love stories twist about each other in a double helix of desire. 'A love story of charm and substance, brimming over with ideas, yet anchored in emotional truth' Sunday Telegraph

Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. His most recent book, The Overstory, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.

A love story of charm and substance, brimming over with ideas, yet anchored in emotional truth. The plot is as labyrinthine as any by Umberto Eco... Extremely witty... Dip into this book at random and the chances are it will sit up and bite you like a rattlesnake * Sunday Telegraph * The most lavishly ambitious American novel since Gravity's Rainbow... An outright marvel * Washington Post * The Gold Bug Variations has everything... Stunning... Almost every sentence is a heroic tour de force... The joy to be taken in reading the book is, like the pleasure of studying crystal multiplication, in seeing a pattern swarm mosaically over everything, watching a stencil laid over life * New York Times * One of the best writers working now -- Audrey Niffenegger Powers has triumphantly restored...the philosophical novel * Observer *