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.
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