Product Description
In his fiction, Parks often seems to challenge himself to master new, complex areas of language, using specialist vocabulary with absolute conviction. In his latest novel, he demonstrates a seemingly effortless mastery of biochemistry. But this is a peripheral theme, though a useful source of metaphor, in a book teeming with knowledge and insight, which is also a fast-paced literary thriller with sex and relationships at its heart. John James is a young English biochemist who travels to Delhi for the funeral of his father Albert. An author's note tells us that the character of Albert James draws on the life and ideas of Gregory Bateson, the extraordinarily eclectic anthropologist who died in 1980 - although James's body of work is entirely invented. In spite of his death just before the novel opens, Albert sits at the centre of it. The reader must decide whether the strange behaviour of Albert's widow towards her son and to the journalist who shortly arrives to probe her husband's life is the product of grief or of something less easily forgiven.
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