Literati is thrilled to welcome Eileen Pollack back to the store in support of her latest book, A Perfect Life.

Love and science converge in Eileen Pollack’s luminous new novel, A Perfect Life. With singular insight and narrative grace, Pollack explores the moral complexities of scientific discovery through the story of a brilliant research biologist facing heartrending decisions about her personal life and the fate that genetics may have preordained for her.

Jane Weiss is a young post doc at MIT who is obsessed with finding the genetic marker for Valentine’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that killed her mother. With the clear vision of a scientist, she knows that she and her sister each stand a fifty percent chance of inheriting the disease, and her research is fueled by a need to discover if they are genetic carriers. Having witnessed the devastating effect that Valentine’s had on her parents’ marriage, Jane has vowed to steer clear of love unless she is sure she is free of the disease, refusing to become a burden on anyone else. But that determination is upended when she meets and falls in love with Willie, whose own father died of Valentine’s. Suddenly, with the very real possibility of their relationship ending in tragedy, her research takes on a new ferocity.

“A Perfect Life probes how we live in the face of uncertainty and the ways risk can both disable and empower us. Eileen Pollack has crafted a tender exploration of family love that is as smart and thought-provoking as it is moving.”--Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You