Charmed Particles (Book acquired a few weeks back)

Chrissy Kolaya’s novel Charmed Particles is forthcoming this fall from Dzanc. Their blurb:

Rural Nicolet, Illinois, is a city anchored between two opposing forces, a living history museum and a laboratory for experiments in high-energy particle physics. When the proposal to build a Superconducting Super Collider under the town sparks debate between the scientists and the locals, two families find themselves on opposite sides of the controversy that fractures the community, exposing deep cultural rifts between longtime friends.

Abhijat, a theoretical physicist from India now working at the National Accelerator Research Laboratory, has a sole obsession: the charm quark, a revolutionary particle and his springboard to international recognition. The search for answers to abstract questions blinds him to the burgeoning distance between him and his wife and daughter. Across town, Rose Winchester strives to raise her precocious daughter Lily, stitching together an unconventional marriage from the brief visits and astounding letters of her husband Randolph, the last great gentleman explorer.

Charmed Particles traces the collision of past and progress, science and tradition, and the unimagined elements that may arise in the aftermath.