Long for This World: A Novel

Set in Seattle at the peak of the dot-com boom, it's a time and place where greed repulses & tempts the nice, decent middle-class family at the heart of the story: middle-aged parents with a teenaged son & daughter. The 17-year-old daughter, a 6'1" basketball player & straight-A student, and the 14-year-old son are trying to find their place in the world, experimenting at low level, in age-appropriate ways, with sex--and talking to their parents, in mutually respectful but cautious & not fully open ways. The mother, a native Austrian, is frustrated with a sense of lack of accomplishment in her work as a hospital administrator, takes up running, & otherwise, like her kids, tries to define or redefine herself. But the plot line that most show more drives the narrative involves the work of the father, a geneticist who specializes in research on a rare disease that causes children to age rapidly & die by their mid-teens. He stumbles across a potential cure--one that may even have the potential to slow or halt the aging process in normal humans. He faces a series of ethical dilemmas, but the author keeps them relatively low-key & they never displace the domestic relationships. If that sometimes means the story moves slowly, it also makes for a refreshingly honest portrait of a decent, talented, professional family, presenting life from the perspective of each member of the family. show less

A sweet book about life and death, mortality and immortality. The main character is a research physician studying accellerated aging, who happens upon a child who has the gene but is not aging.

One of my favorites. A doctor struggles with a patient, and his reaseach, while dealing with family issues.