Particles and Luck — Louis B. Jones

Mark Perdue and Roger Hoberman have nothing in common -- except the joy of adjoining yards. Mark is a whiz-kid physicist who knows that his “genius” stature and his endowed chair at Berkeley are bits of dumb luck; Roger is the owner of a pizza franchise whose luck has turned dumb -- in financial and marital distress, he has been denied child visitation rights but not babysitting obligations.

Now luck, in the form of an adverse claim on their property, brings Mark and Roger together for a fateful Halloween night neither of them will ever forget. Loony, humane, and transcendently wise, Particles and Luck is an irresistible comedy of manners and epistemology.

“A lovely and invigorating novel . . . a domestic farce and social satire. Jones writes [an] engaging novelistic equivalent of a unified field theory -- in this case, a link between the human heart and the behavior of subatomic particles.” -- Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times

“Jones is the real thing -- a writer with something to say and his own way of saying it.” -- Scott Turow