SUSAN M. GAINES
SUSAN M. GAINES is the author of the novel Carbon Dreams and the science narrative Echoes of Life: What Fossil Molecules Reveal About Earth History. Her short stories have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies and been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and been selected for the Best of the West. Gaines’s fiction is informed by a youth spent hiking and birding California’s mountains and coastline, and by her education in chemistry and oceanography. She is the recipient of an Art in Science Fellowship at the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study, as well as the 2018 Suffrage Science Award. Gaines divides her time between her native California, Uruguay, and Germany, where she co-directs the Fiction Meets Science research and fellowship program.
BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR
ACCIDENTALS
A Novel
When Gabriel’s mother decides to repatriate to her native Uruguay after thirty years in California, he takes a break from his uninspiring desk job to accompany her. At first, Gabe observes his mother’s squabbling family in the same detached way he watches the new species of birds he encounters in the marsh on their neglected land—but when he falls in love with a local biologist, he is suddenly transformed from observer to the main character in his family’s transnational saga. As Gabe and Alejandra struggle to confront the environmental devastation of their twenty-first-century future, they find themselves mired in the mud of their parents'—and their countries'—Cold War–era past.
"Gaines’s melding of sensual landscapes with ruminations on political history and environmental devastation will be a treat for conservationists, and her critique of globalization and portrayal of sibling rivalry are particularly well rendered. Barbara Kingsolver fans will want to take a look."
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY