“I’m not adopted. But that longing and that sense of absence . . . are perhaps other ways of expressing the actualities of my family. Different facts, same emotions.”

On the river, Bianca Marburg leaned toward the water and closed her hand around a yellow bowl that was floating, calmly upright, past her kayak. The bowl was dry inside, empty but for a beetle 

There’s this man—a scientist, not a fiction writer—who interests me. Who has interested me for almost five years; who is so odd, so smart, so impossible to understand that I keep sifting through the facts of his life in search of a pattern.