String Theory — Dara Horn

Sibling rivalry runs in the family -- a prequel to A Guide for the Perplexed.

In 1980, Jacqueline Luria, the first female physics doctoral candidate in her university's history, has emerged from her ultra-Orthodox upbringing into a secular world where she tries to untangle the origins of the universe. Then she meets Roger Ashkenazi, a mathematician studying fractals and starting to question his own atheist ideas. Their insights into the world's repeating patterns cannot prepare them for the coming disaster of their marriage -- or its impact on their daughters, one an average child and the other a genuine genius. The rivalry between Judith Ashkenazi and her wildly successful sister Josie, who invents a software program to catalog every kind of memory, will fuel the page-turning plot of Dara Horn's critically acclaimed novel A Guide for the Perplexed.

“String Theory” takes its readers to the farthest edges of knowledge and the limits of freedom, on a journey from doubt to faith and back again. In its double helix of free will and fate, it anticipates the terrifying consequences, borne out in A Guide for the Perplexed, of asking children to fulfill their parents' dreams.