Strong Motion

Franzen's dazzling follow-up to The Twenty-Seventh City is about earthquakes, pollution, love, and abortion rights.

Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of ecological upheaval (a rash of earthquakes on the North Shore) and odd luck: the first one kills his grandmother. Louis tries to maintain his independence, but falls in love with a Harvard seismologist whose discoveries about the earthquakes' cause complicate everything.