The Scientists: A Family Romance

Named a Best Book of the Year by Vogue, Los Angeles Times, and The New Republic
New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

A FRANK, INTELLIGENT, AND DEEPLY MOVING DEBUT MEMOIR

The precocious only child of a doctor and a classical musician, Marco Roth was able to share his parents' New York. Theirs was a world that revolved around house concerts, a private library of literary classics, and discussions of the latest advances in medicine―and one that ended when Marco's father started to suffer the worst effects of the AIDS virus that had infected him in the early 1980s. What this family could not talk about for years came to dominate the lives of its surviving members, with surprising and often devastating effects. Written in the tradition of Edmund Gosse, Henry Adams, and J. R. Ackerley, The Scientists is a book that grapples with a troubled intellectual and emotional inheritance―the ways in which we learn from our parents, and then learn to see them separately from ourselves.

Marco Roth was raised amid the vanished liberal culture of Manhattan's Upper West Side. After studying comparative literature at Columbia and Yale, he helped found the magazine n+1, in 2004. Recipient of the 2011 Shattuck prize for literary criticism, he lives in Philadelphia. The Scientists is his first book.