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An astounding novel, where personal ambition battles against family love, and the most complex intellectual ideas leap from the page with dazzling and seductive beauty

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The flame of genius scorches every generation it touches.
Following a lonely upbringing in the woods of northern Michigan, Milo Andret enrols as a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley, where the faculty is the first to recognize that the young man´s childhood solitude has created a prodigiously unusual mind. Yet with Milo´s great gifts come great risks, and California in the seventies is rife with temptation. The research he begins at Berkeley will make him a legend; the woman, and the rival he meets, will haunt him forever. For it soon becomes clear that Milo´s brilliance is linked to a dark need that ultimately threatens to destroy not only his work and his marriage, but the lives of all his children, as well.
A Doubter´s Almanac is at once a captivatingly virtuoso illustration of the powers of the mind and a deeply moving exploration of the nature of love, ambition and genius. It is a novel of flawed characters and unreachable dreams, of bonds that tie and passions that destroy; a major work of dazzling and seductive beauty from one of our foremost writers.

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Searing scenes place Canin in a particular East Coast American tradition of meticulously detailed domestic realism that descends through a line of Johns - Cheever, Updike, Irving . These influences, though, add up to a remarkable achievement of Canin´s own. This is big, serious, completely involving fiction of a kind rarely written today ... Canin has achieved a proof of his own high value to American fiction Mark Lawson Guardian

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Ethan Canin is the author of seven books, including the story collections Emperor of the Air and The Palace Thief and the novels For Kings and Planets, Carry Me Across the Water and America America. He is on the faculty of the Iowa Writers´ Workshop and divides his time between Iowa and northern Michigan. He is also a physician.
ethancanin.com

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