With this rollicking novel--hailed equally for its satiric bite, its lightly borne scientific savvy, and its tender compassion for foible-prone humanity--one of America's preeminent storytellers returns to fiction for the first time in a decade.

Guy Carpenter is a regular guy, a family man, an obscure NASA scientist, when he is jolted out of his quiet life and summoned to the corridors of power in Washington, DC. Through a turn of events as unlikely as it is inevitable, Guy finds himself compromised by scandal and romance, hounded by Hollywood, and agonizingly alone at the white-hot center of a firestorm ignited as three potent forces of American culture--politics, big science, and the media--spectacularly collide.