Gain braids together two stories on very different scales. In one, Laura Body, divorced mother of two and a real-estate agent in the small town of Lacewood, Illinois, plunges into a new existence when she learns that she has ovarian cancer. In the other, Clare & Company, a soap manufacturer begun by three brothers in nineteenth-century Boston, grows over the course of a century and a half into an international consumer products conglomerate based...

A dazzling new novel by the author of Galatea 2.2 and Gain In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, a band of virtual-reality researchers races to complete the Cavern, an empty white room that can become a jungle, a painting, or a vast Byzantine cathedral. In a war-torn Mediterranean city, an American is held hostage, chained to a radiator in another empty white room. What can possibly join these two remote places? Only the shared imagination,...

A man's experiment in creating the ideal woman. He is Richard Powers, a professor with a taste for the cerebral. As no woman matches his expectations, he creates Helen, a talking intelligence which he programs with his favored books. The novel follows Richard and Helen's relationship to its sad and inevitable conclusion. By the author of The Gold Bug Variations.

A group of sick children in a hospital in Los Angeles and the people who work to keep them alive, to combine fact and fantasy, revealing to adults the forgotten place they came from and preparing the children for the hidden destination they are off to.