Gods of Aberdeen: A Novel

A haunting novel about a brilliant young man who enrolls at a small New England college and becomes entangled in a mysterious death -- and the ultimate scientific quest. Eric Dunne is a sixteen-year-old academic phenom. Desperate to escape his foster family, Eric graduates early from high school and earns a scholarship to Aberdeen College, a small, prestigious school in northern Connecticut. Aberdeen is a school for the privileged youth of America's elite, an isolated world where hard drinking and hard studying go hand in hand. When Eric is assigned a work-study job with the college's head librarian, Cornelius Graves, Eric begins to hear strange and disconcerting rumors about his new mentor. Despite himself, he is curiously drawn to Cornelius, if only to divine whether it's true that he's searching for the Philosopher's Stone, a mythical substance that supposedly holds the secret to eternal life. At the same time, Eric's preternatural aptitude for Latin quickly attracts the attention of Arthur Fitch, a charismatic and aloof senior who invites him to become a research assistant for Dr. William Cade, Aberdeen's most celebrated professor. Eric is accepted into Cade's small circle of sophisticated students, all of whom live off campus on Cade's country estate, and soon discovers that his new friends are not just conducting research for Dr. Cade -- they, too, are searching for the Philosopher's Stone. When an alchemical experiment goes fatally wrong, Eric is drawn deeper into the dark secrets surrounding the legendary substance. As the police investigation narrows and Eric gets swept up in Professor Cade's obsession, the tensions on the estate and in Eric's new friendships threaten to explode and, with them, Eric's idealized world. Like The Secret History and A Separate Peace, Gods of Aberdeen demonstrates the selfishness and savagery that can lie at the heart of the most rarefied academic setting.

From Publishers Weekly

In Nathan's somewhat derivative debut (think Donna Tartt's The Secret History, with a little magic thrown in), Eric Dunne, a 16-year-old wunderkind, orphan and autodidact Latin prodigy, escapes New Jersey thanks to a scholarship to Aberdeen College, where his quest for knowledge inevitably comes at a very high price. On the ivied New England campus, Eric dabbles in awkward sexual fumblings and psychedelic drugs, but specializes in the occult, with fatal results. Apprenticed to fossilized academics including head librarian Cornelius Graves and star medievalist William Cade, he also teams up with fellow research assistants Art Fitch, Howie Spacks and Dan Higgins in search of the philosopher's stone, which supposedly holds the key to immortality. Eric and his rumpled, preppy cohorts quote Chaucer at each other, identify with Charlemagne and jet off to Prague in search of a lost alchemical tome. Eric's intellectual musings ("But it was doomed from the start, putting so much faith in knowledge, not realizing that knowledge by itself can be dangerous") share space with awkward exposition and purple description, but Nathan perfectly captures the angst and pretension of adolescents taking themselves very seriously. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

America's love affair with higher learning continues--reading about it, anyway. This latest entry in the codes-'n'-classics sweepstakes stars Eric Dunne, a 16-year-old Dickensian naif; an orphan sent to live in a New Jersey slum with his callous aunt, he teaches himself Latin in the public school library and wins a scholarship to stately Aberdeen University in Connecticut. His genius wins him a place on the elite research team of a superstar professor writing his magnum opus on the Middle Ages. But living in the professor's house, Eric learns of another project: the quest for the Philosopher's Stone, the supposed secret to eternal life. Eric and his cohorts are hard to empathize with or even to believe, spouting Latin at each other and seeming more like scholarly homunculi than flesh-and-blood undergrads. But Ivy-covered libraries and musty stacks do make the perfect setting for far-fetched mysteries, especially in an era when libraries themselves are mysteries to too many. Readers who liked The Rule of Four (2004) are likely to like this. Keir GraffCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Micah Nathan was born in Hollywood, raised in Western New York farm country, and now lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with his wife. He is a graduate of SUNY Buffalo. Gods of Aberdeen is his first novel.

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