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W. W. Norton
August 2013
On Sale: August 12, 2013
256 pages
ISBN: 0393240002
EAN: 9780393240009
Kindle: B00AQ3VV18
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction
Winner of the National Book Award for her collection of
stories Ship Fever, Andrea Barrett has become one
of our most admired and beloved writers. In this magnificent
new book, she unfolds five pivotal moments in the lives of
her characters and in the history of
knowledge.
During the summer of 1908,
twelve-year-old Constantine Boyd is witness to an explosion
of home-spun investigation—from experiments with
cave-dwelling fish without eyes to scientifically bred crops
to motorized bicycles and the flight of an early aeroplane.
In 1920, a popular science writer and young widow tries,
immediately after the bloodbath of the First World War, to
explain the new theory of relativity to an audience (herself
included) desperate to believe in an “ether of space”
housing spirits of the dead. Half a century earlier, in
1873, a famous biologist struggles to maintain his sense of
the hierarchies of nature as Darwin’s new theory of
evolution threatens to make him ridiculous in the eyes of a
precocious student. The twentieth-century realms of science
and war collide in the last two stories, as developments in
genetics and X-ray technology that had once held so much
promise fail to protect humans—among them, a young American
soldier, Constantine Boyd, sent to Archangel, Russia, in
1919—from the failures of governments and from the brutality
of war. In these brilliant fictions rich with fact, Barrett explores
the thrill and sense of loss that come with scientific
progress and the personal passions and impersonal politics
that shape all human knowledge.
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