The Gold Bug Variations

National Bestseller

National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Playground and The Overstory, a magnificent double love story of two young couples separated by a distance of twenty-five years.

“The most lavishly ambitious American novel since Gravity’s Rainbow . . . An outright marvel.” —Washington Post

Stuart Ressler, a brilliant young molecular 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 scientific 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.

The critically acclaimed third novel from Pulitzer Prize–winning author Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations is an intellectual tour-de-force that probes the meaning of love, science, music, and art.

“A dense, symmetrical symphony in which no note goes unsounded.”  - New York Times Book Review

“Magnificent...Powers’s characters are fascinating, brilliant, eccentric people...but beyond that is the ability to induce the reader to see the world differently, revealed in a new light.”  - San Francisco Chronicle

“The Gold Bug Variations is the most important and intellectually challenging American novel published this year.”  - Philadelphia Inquirer

“Eloquent and fascinating... The Gold Bug Variations is a rambling, playful, lush, vain, bold and mighty worthwhile lap breaker.” - Chicago Tribune

“Deeply enriching...challenging and original.”  - Publishers Weekly