Editions

The Gold Bug Variations

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9781784709723

  • Length: 688  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 34mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 495g

  • RRP: £10.99

The Gold Bug Variations

An enthralling story about desire, new love and the mysteries of science from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory

Stuart Ressler, a brilliant 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 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.

‘A love story of charm and substance, brimming over with ideas, yet anchored in emotional truth’ Sunday Telegraph

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9781784709723

  • Length: 688  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 34mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 495g

  • RRP: £10.99

Reviews

  • A love story of charm and substance, brimming over with ideas, yet anchored in emotional truth. The plot is as labyrinthine as any by Umberto Eco... Extremely witty... Dip into this book at random and the chances are it will sit up and bite you like a rattlesnake

    Sunday Telegraph

  • The most lavishly ambitious American novel since Gravity's Rainbow... An outright marvel

    Washington Post

  • The Gold Bug Variations has everything... Stunning... Almost every sentence is a heroic tour de force... The joy to be taken in reading the book is, like the pleasure of studying crystal multiplication, in seeing a pattern swarm mosaically over everything, watching a stencil laid over life

    New York Times

  • One of the best writers working now

    Audrey Niffenegger

  • Powers has triumphantly restored...the philosophical novel

    Observer

More from this Author

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About the Author

Richard Powers

Richard Powers is the author of twelve novels, including Orfeo (which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), The Echo Maker, The Time of Our Singing, Galatea 2.2 and Plowing the Dark. He is the recipient of a MacArthur grant and the National Book Award, and has been a Pulitzer Prize and four-time NBCC finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

Richard Powers

Read more

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News

Daisy Johnson, Rachel Kushner and Richard Powers shortlisted for Man Booker Prize 2018

Three Penguin Random House books have made it onto the shortlist for the 2018 Man Booker Prize; making up half of the six-strong list.
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Extracts

The Overstory by Richard Powers

'That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen.' Read an extract from Richard Powers’ monumental novel, The Overstory.

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