DollieWhen we first met, we were just two kids with nothing in common. Different interests and struggles put a wedge between us before we could ever be friends.Then a terrible childhood trauma bonded us, bringing us closer forever. We became each other's everything. A light in the dark that the other needed to make it through.All that changed the night my beloved parents died.He couldn't be my comforter anymore.He couldn't be around me at all.Because my words sentenced him to years behind bars.AmbroseI should hate her for putting me in prison. For moving on with her life while I wasted ten lonely years writing letters she never replied to...but hate isn't what I feel as I watch from the shadows of the family home after she returns for the first time since that night.My sweet Dollie has no idea we're living in the same house, because she still can't step foot upstairs.But I like that I'm close enough to comfort her again. Because she needs it more than ever, and she can't get it from her boyfriend.We grow a little closer each time we talk anonymously. Each time she reaches out and tells a stranger of something awful that he's done, I'm there to soothe her pain.She wonders how I know her so well. How I'm able to take away all the hurt she's feeling.But she has no idea that I've been doing it her whole life.

Spanning the globe and several centuries, The Gene is the story of the quest to decipher the master-code that makes and defines humans, that governs our form and function. The story of the gene begins in an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856 where a monk stumbles on the idea of a ‘unit of heredity’. It intersects with Darwin’s theory of evolution, and collides with the horrors of Nazi eugenics in the 1940s. The gene transforms post-war biology. It reorganizes our understanding of sexuality, temperament, choice and free will. This is a story driven by human ingenuity and obsessive minds – from Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to Francis Crick, James Watson and Rosalind Franklin, and the thousands of scientists still working to understand the code of codes. This is an epic, moving history of a scientific idea coming to life, by the author of The Emperor of All Maladies. But woven through The Gene, like a red line, is also an intimate history – the story of Mukherjee’s own family and its recurring pattern of mental illness, reminding us that genetics is vitally relevant to everyday lives. These concerns reverberate even more urgently today as we learn to “read” and “write” the human genome – unleashing the potential to change the fates and identities of our children. Majestic in its ambition, and unflinching in its honesty, The Gene gives us a definitive account of the fundamental unit of heredity – and a vision of both humanity’s past and future.