A national bestseller, voted by Time as the #1 novel of 1991, selected as one of the 'Best Books of 1991' by Publishers Weekly, and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award--a magnificent story that probes the meaning of love, science, music, and art, by the brilliant author of Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. Stuart Ressler, an up-and-coming molecular biologist, finds his career sidetracked by the turmoil of the sixties, and a young couple of the 1980s tries to discover why the biologist abandoned his scientific pursuits. The Gold Bug Variations is a double love story of two young couples separated by a distance of twenty-five years.