New York, NY: Knopf (pub: April 2, 2019)

An emotionally engaging, suspenseful new novel from the best-selling author, told in the voice of a renowned physicist: an exploration of female friendship, romantic love, and parenthood—bonds that show their power in surprising ways.

Helen Clapp’s breakthrough work on black holes in five-dimensional spacetime landed her a tenured professorship at MIT; her popular books explain physics in plain terms. Helen is skeptical, even contemptuous, of anything remotely pseudo-scientific. So it’s particularly vexing when, early one morning, she gets a phone call from a friend who has just died. The friend is Charlie Boyce, Helen’s roommate at Harvard, who turned away from a potentially brilliant life in academia for a career in TV writing in Los Angeles, in part because of the unwanted attention she received from a star professor. Charlie and Helen would confide in each other about their children; about their respective careers in boys’ club professions, and, in Charlie’s case, in an industry that pigeonholed her because she was black. But as the years passed, Charlie became more elusive; her calls came less and less often. She became ill. And now she is permanently, tragically gone.

As Helen is drawn back into Charlie’s orbit, and into the feelings she once had for a scientific competitor on the verge of a Nobel Prize-winning discovery, she is forced to question the laws of the universe that always steadied her mind and heart.

Funny, wise, sharply perceptive, taking us from the storied campuses of Cambridge to Hollywood and back, Lost and Wanted is a moving story of friends and lovers, lost and found, at the most defining moments of their lives.

NELL FREUDENBERGER is the author of the novels The Newlyweds and The Dissident, and the story collection Lucky Girls, winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library, she lives in Brooklyn with her family.