The new novel from the bestselling author of Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides.Brown University, 1982. Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English student and incurable romantic, is writing her thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot - authors of the great marriage plots. As Madeleine studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very different men, intervenes.Leonard Bankhead, brilliant scientist and charismatic loner, attracts Madeleine with an intensity that she seems ...