Science and Romance

These two novels will appeal to readers who hope through fiction to learn something—one of the books delves into the intricacies of higher mathematics while the other offers more than glimpses into the rarefied world of particle physics. But what we learn much more is what it is like to live in a certain time and a certain place. In Robert Carr’s Continuums, that place and time is Ceausescu’s Romania in the 1960s and ’70s; in David Manicom’s Anna’s Shadow, it is Moscow in the late autumn of 1993 with Mikhail Gorbachev’s experiment with democracy imploding around Boris Yeltsin’s ears. The main characters in both books are brilliant women (there is something about strong, able East European women that seems to appeal to the western male, including the western male writer), each trying to get out of her country: Anna Mikataev is a physicist at work on something so sensitive to the global arms race she needs to be given refuge in the basement of the Canadian...