New York: Norton, (2013) dj. Hardcover first edition - A collection of five long stories by this National Book award-winning writer - stories which draw on her training in biology and which focus on the intersections between science and ethics, as they "unfold five pivotal moments in the lives of her characters and in the history of knowledge. . . In 1920, a popular science writer and young widow tries, immediately after the bloodbath of the First World War, to explain the new theory of relativity to an audience (herself included) desperate to believe in an 'ether of space' housing spirits of the dead. In 1873, a famous biologist struggles to maintain his sense of the hierarchies of nature as Darwins new theory of evolution threatens to make him ridiculous in the eyes of a precocious student. The twentieth-century realms of science and war collide in the last two stories, as developments in genetics and X-ray technology that had once held so much promise fail to protect humans - among them, a young American soldier, Constantine Boyd, sent to Archangel, Russia, in 1919 - from the failures of governments and from the brutality of war." 238 pp. ISBN: 978-0393240009.