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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 investigationβfrom 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 βether of spaceβ 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 Darwinβs 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 humansβamong them, a young American soldier, Constantine Boyd, sent to Archangel, Russia, in 1919βfrom 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.
 Media BuzzStudio 360 - November 2, 2013
All Things Considered - August 26, 2013
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