Description de l’éditeur
In the arena of life and death, the world's most brilliant doctors and scientists vie desperately - and ruthlessly - for the ultimate prize: the Nobel.
Adam Coopersmith is a gifted and compassionate physician. Trapped in an unhappy marriage, he meets Anya, a Russian émigrée, and falls in love for the first time - only to have his career nearly destroyed.
Sandy Raven is a cutting-edge researcher whose devotion is matched only by his genius. Yet as he makes his greatest discovery, he experiences his most profound betrayal. Will he choose to live a lie or abandon his dream to seek new, more worldly prizes?
Isabel da Costa. A child prodigy, she owes all her success to her father, but though she becomes a brilliant physicist, she can't capture her lost childhood. Ultimately she is torn between the father and the young man who holds the key to her happiness, until a shocking revelation explodes her world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Segal stretches himself in this wisest, most mature of his novels, a long, richly researched work about scientific genius that offers substantial rewards. Many will feel giddy when entering the mind of child prodigy Isabel da Costa, a physicist who creates a formula for the Unified Field Theory that baffled Einstein for the last 20 years of his life. Also on hand and headed toward likely Nobel Prizes are Sandy Raven, a geneticist who reverses the aging process in cells, and tragic Adam Coopersmith, who creates MR-Alpha, a drug that overcomes the antivirus that keeps many women from becoming pregnant. The childhoods, family dramas and love affairs of these three geniuses generate steady interest, as do their battles to be accepted, but the real kicker comes when two of the three find themselves facing fatal illnesses. Some of Segal's pages are less than inspired, mainly those about Sandy's obsession with an actress who becomes head of 20th Century-Fox, but few will care as Isabel, Adam and Sandy hack into undiscovered country and Nobels hover ever closer in what could be Segal's biggest hit since Love Story. 250,000 first printing; major ad/promo; Literary Guild main selection; Doubleday Book Club selection; Reader's Digest Condensed Book.
