Lost and Wanted by Nell Freudenberger
Lost and Wanted by Nell Freudenberger
"Helen Clapp, a renowned physicist, describes her work as the study of forces. But the death of Charlie, one of her oldest and dearest friends, leaves her at the mercy of forces that aren't easy to define or understand... especially when she starts receiving text messages from Charlie's phone. Freudenberger beautifully illuminates how Helen's grief touches all areas of her life—including her young son, and her feelings about the reappearance of a former partner and colleague—and the result is a story that's thoughtful, graceful, and wonderfully intelligent. " - Recommended by Erika
Helen Clapp's breakthrough work on five-dimensional spacetime landed her a tenured professorship at MIT; her popular books explain physics in plain terms. Helen disdains notions of the supernatural in favor of rational thought and proven ideas. So it's perhaps especially vexing for her when, on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday in June, she gets a phone call from a friend who has just died.
That friend was Charlotte Boyce, Helen's roommate at Harvard. The two women had once confided in each other about everything--in college, the unwanted advances Charlie received from a star literature professor; after graduation, Helen's struggles as a young woman in science, Charlie's as a black screenwriter in Hollywood, their shared challenges as parents. But as the years passed, Charlie became more elusive, and her calls came less and less often. And now she's permanently, tragically gone.
As Helen is drawn back into Charlie's orbit, and also into the web of feelings she once had for Neel Jonnal--a former college classmate now an acclaimed physicist on the verge of a Nobel Prize-winning discovery--she is forced to question the laws of the universe that had always steadied her mind and heart.