The flame of genius scorches every generation it touches Following a lonely upbringing in the woods of northern Michigan Milo Andret enrols as a graduate student at UC Berkeley where the faculty is the first to recognize that the young man's childhood solitude has created a prodigiously unusual mind Yet with Milo's great gifts come great risks & California in the seventies is rife with temptation The research he begins at Berkeley will make him a legend; the woman & the rival he meets will haunt him forever For it soon becomes clear that Milo's brilliance is linked to a dark need that ultimately threatens to destroy not only his work & his marriage but the lives of all his children as well A Doubter's Almanac is at once a captivatingly virtuoso illustration of the powers of the mind & a deeply moving exploration of the nature of love ambition & genius It is a novel of flawed characters & unreachable dreams of bonds that tie & passions that destroy; a major work of dazzling & seductive beauty from one of our foremost writers