Mendel's Dwarf

published by Transworld in UK (1997) and Harmony Books (Crown) in the US (1998)

In the final 10 for the Booker Prize, 1997
A finalist for one of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes for 1999
A New York Public Library "Book to Remember, 1998"

 

"...[a] furious, tender, and wittily erudite book."
The New Yorker

Mendel's Dwarf is a compassionate contemplation of a life that is, in many ways, terribly unfair. This novel takes us to the brave new world of genetic science through the eyes and heart of a man who knows that his own particular strain of humanity will have no place in it.

Behind the walls of a mid-19th-century Austrian monastery, Gregor Mendel carried out experiments with garden peas that ignited the modern science of genetics. More than a hundred years later, Dr. Benedict Lambert, Mendel's great-great-great nephew, is a brilliant geneticist, and, ironically, a dwarf. The target of his research is the single gene that caused him.

Inured to the world's sidelong stares and ill-disguised curiosity, Ben never expected to find anything approaching reciprocated love -- until he met Jean. Weaving the life of Ben's distant Uncle Gregor and Ben's own tender, sardonic, unexpectedly erotic story, Mendel's Dwarf is a novel that questions the meaning of normality and sounds the depths of passion in a world that is drifting ever further from the old moral certainties.

 

 

 

© Simon Mawer 2008 - 2009. This website is written and maintained by the author.