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A grand gothic novel of the outer reaches of passion -- of the body and of the mind -- PROPERTIES OF LIGHT is a mesmerizing tale of consuming love and murderous professional envy that carries the reader into the very heart of a physics problem so huge and perplexing it thwarted even Einstein: the nature of light. Caught in the entanglements of erotic and intellectual passion are three physicists: Samuel Mallach is a brilliant theoretician unhinged by the professional glory he feels has been stolen from him; Dana is his intriguing and gifted daughter, whose desperate devotion to her father contributes to the tragic undoing of Justin Childs, her lover and her father's protege. All three are working together to solve some of the deepest and most controversial problems in quantum mechanics, problems that challenge our understanding of the "real world" and of the nature of time.
The book grapples with these elusive mysteries, but at its heart is a fiery love story of startling urgency. Insights into quantum mechanics and relativity theory are attached to the nerve fibers of human emotions, and these connections are alive with poignancy and pathos.
For these characters, the passion to know and understand, like the desire for love, is full of terrible risk, holding out possibilities for heartbreak as well as for ecstasy. The true subject of Properties of Light is the ecstatic response to reality, perhaps the only response that can embrace the erotic and the poetic, the scientific and the spiritual. Written with, and about, a rare form of passion, this incandescent novel is fiction at its most daring and utterly original.

"The novel's...refractive narration, lush prose and obsessive characters are reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov. Like Nabokov, Goldstein is as focused on the manner of telling as on the tale itself. Her pitch is high and romantic, which seems odd for the rarefied ideas being communicated, until we realize that it takes a certain wild state of mind to bring properties of light to bear on all the darkness around us."

Floyd Skloot, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, 08/27/2000

"Though it's impossible not to admire Ms. Goldstein's efforts to write a Gothic suspense story that's also a novel of ideas, her characters remain too two-dimensional and her storytelling too ponderous for the reader to ever become fully engaged."

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, 08/29/2000

Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics: Search Results