A Scientific Romance

Plot

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE • WINNER OF THE DAVID HIGHAM PRIZE (UK) • NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: THE GLOBE AND MAIL, THE SUNDAY TIMES, AND THE NEW YORK TIMESRonald Wright’s unforgettable chronicle of love, plague and time travel—in the tradition of Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid's Tale.It is 1999, and David Lambert, jilted lover and reluctant museum curator, is about to discover the startling news of the return of H. G. Wells’s time machine to London. Driven by a host of unanswered questions and innate curiosity, Lambert propels himself deep into the new millennium. As he sets foot in the luxuriant but menacing new landscape, he also explores the ruins of his life, a labyrinth of erotic obsession and remorse involving his old friend Bird—jazz musician, classicist, small-time crook—and Anita, the beautiful, eccentric Egyptologist they both loved, mysteriously dead at thirty-two. Personal and universal, witty and elegiac, David’s odyssey through conscience and civilization builds to an unforgettable indictment of human arrogance in the tradition of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and the great ‘scientific romances’ of H.G. Wells.