The Gold Bug Variations
Description
National Bestseller
National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory and the forthcoming Bewilderment, a magnificent double love story of two young couples separated by a distance of twenty-five years.
“The most lavishly ambitious American novel since Gravity’s Rainbow . . . An outright marvel.” —Washington Post
Stuart Ressler, a brilliant young molecular 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 scientific 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.
The critically acclaimed third novel from Pulitzer Prize–winning author Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations is an intellectual tour-de-force that probes the meaning of love, science, music, and art.
Praise for The Gold Bug Variations
“A dense, symmetrical symphony in which no note goes unsounded.” — New York Times Book Review
“Magnificent...Powers’s characters are fascinating, brilliant, eccentric people...but beyond that is the ability to induce the reader to see the world differently, revealed in a new light.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“The Gold Bug Variations is the most important and intellectually challenging American novel published this year.” — Philadelphia Inquirer
“Eloquent and fascinating... The Gold Bug Variations is a rambling, playful, lush, vain, bold and mighty worthwhile lap breaker.” — Chicago Tribune
“Deeply enriching...challenging and original.” — Publishers Weekly