Gain

From Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of The Overstory, Richard Powers's Gain braids together two stories on very different scales.

In one, Laura Body, divorced mother of two and a real-estate agent in the small town of Lacewood, Illinois, plunges into a new existence when she learns that she has ovarian cancer. In the other, Clare & Company, a soap manufacturer begun by three brothers in nineteenth-century Boston, grows over the course of a century and a half in...