The Scientists: A Family Romance

Roth, Marco

ISBN 10: 1470847434 ISBN 13: 9781470847432

Publisher: Blackstone Pub, 2012

Synopsis

Tells the story of the author's family and how they dealt with his father's suffering and death from AIDS.

About this title

Review

'Among the incidental pleasures of The Scientists is the glimpse of a rarefied subset of New York's intelligentsia, as close to extinction now as Thomas Mann's merchant princes were in his day. Appealingly honest, and in its own way wrestles with the large conflicts its talented author has confronted, and survived.'

(James Lasdun Guardian)

‘Compulsive memoir. Effortlessly erudite and often startlingly precise. He writes beautifully. That care, which breathes through every paragraph, is freighted too with a kind of desperation. This is a book that Roth feels born, or doomed to write. You guess that few authors have been more relieved to get to the final page of a book than this one; for my part, as a reader, I was just sad it had ended.'

(Tim Adams Observer)

‘It is the glimpses of real emotion beneath the veneer of slightly self-regarding learning that renders it ultimately haunting.’

(Sunday Times)

 ‘Roth’s poised prose transforms the confusion of his youth into something like wisdom.’

(Anthony Cummins Metro)

‘The book is infused with a tension between Roth’s fear of betraying his family and his need to save himself. While acknowledging that writing about the deception at the centre of his parents’ lives was their ultimate fear, Roth sees the act of memoir as a way of wresting his future from his family’s past. In characteristically elegant, precise prose, Roth deftly reconstructs an isolated family life of “alone together”. The Scientists is a penetrating memoir dripping with self-scrutiny and endowed with a devastating portrait of a man harbouring a secret he knew would unravel. ‘

(Sunday Business Post)

‘Moving and engagingly written debut.’

(The Bookseller)

About the Author

Marco Roth was raised amid the vanished liberal culture of Manhattan's Upper West Side. After studying comparative literature at Columbia and Yale, he helped found the magazinen+1, in 2004. Recipient of the 2011 Shattuck prize for literary criticism, he lives in Philadelphia.The Scientists is his first book.

Edition details

• Publisher: Blackstone Pub
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1470847434
• ISBN 13: 9781470847432
• Binding: Audio CD