| Vendor | |
|---|---|
|
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik |
| Original language | |
| English | |
A PERFECT LIFE
In the vein of STATE OF WONDER by Ann Patchett, THE VALENTINE'S GENE gracefully examines the moral complexities that accompany scientific discovery.
Jane Weiss is a postdoc at MIT obsessed with finding the genetic marker for Valentine's, a neurodegenerative disorder which killed her mother, and which she and her freewheeling sister, Laurel, stand a fifty percent chance of inheriting.
The summer before her father's second wedding, Jane falls for her future stepbrother, Willie, whose father also died from Valentine's, making him statistically the worst possible man she could marry. Just as her pregnancy test comes up positive, he calls off the relationship.
The events are modeled after the seminal mapping of Huntington's Disease to a specific chromosome in 1983. There is still no cure. The unusually long gestation period gives THE VALENTINE'S GENE an incredible depth and resonance. Like Richard Powers' The Gold Bug Variations and Allegra Goodman's Intuition, Eileen Pollack's compelling novel offers an intimate portrait of scientists engaged in research with the potential to change all our livesand equally engaged in relationships that change their own lives.
Eileen's provocative 2013 article Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science? in The New York Times Magazine received over 1,000 comments and was the Times's most emailed story for an entire week. She also received 1250 private responses to the story, including glowing avowals of support from Jeffrey Eugenides, Sheryl Sandberg, and Nobel Laureate Carol Geider, with interview requests from multiple national NPR outlets, CNN, and periodicals around the world. She has been invited to speak at MIT, Berkeley, Barnard, Yale, Harvard, and many other universities, conferences, groups, and societies around the country. The article was an excerpt from Eileen's non-fiction book THE ONLY WOMAN IN THE ROOM: WHY SCIENCE IS STILL A BOYS' CLUB, which Beacon will publish in September. Eileen is active on social media, and the promotion of THE ONLY WOMAN IN THE ROOM should layer an incredible base of support for THE VALENTINE'S GENE.
The summer before her father's second wedding, Jane falls for her future stepbrother, Willie, whose father also died from Valentine's, making him statistically the worst possible man she could marry. Just as her pregnancy test comes up positive, he calls off the relationship.
The events are modeled after the seminal mapping of Huntington's Disease to a specific chromosome in 1983. There is still no cure. The unusually long gestation period gives THE VALENTINE'S GENE an incredible depth and resonance. Like Richard Powers' The Gold Bug Variations and Allegra Goodman's Intuition, Eileen Pollack's compelling novel offers an intimate portrait of scientists engaged in research with the potential to change all our livesand equally engaged in relationships that change their own lives.
Eileen's provocative 2013 article Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science? in The New York Times Magazine received over 1,000 comments and was the Times's most emailed story for an entire week. She also received 1250 private responses to the story, including glowing avowals of support from Jeffrey Eugenides, Sheryl Sandberg, and Nobel Laureate Carol Geider, with interview requests from multiple national NPR outlets, CNN, and periodicals around the world. She has been invited to speak at MIT, Berkeley, Barnard, Yale, Harvard, and many other universities, conferences, groups, and societies around the country. The article was an excerpt from Eileen's non-fiction book THE ONLY WOMAN IN THE ROOM: WHY SCIENCE IS STILL A BOYS' CLUB, which Beacon will publish in September. Eileen is active on social media, and the promotion of THE ONLY WOMAN IN THE ROOM should layer an incredible base of support for THE VALENTINE'S GENE.
| Available products |
|---|
|
Book
Published 2016-05-01 by Ecco |