She has always thought of herself as coolly objective, but botanist Grace Stern's first response to everything is immediate and physical - from a display of pollen-laden anthers against scarlet petals to the mountain peak where her irrepressible mother was killed by lightning. Grace's father Byron, shattered by his loss, soon disappeared, leaving young Grace in the care of Imo, her charming but embittered grandmother.

As the world holds its breath in the days before the Gulf War, Grace has turned from the confusing and disheartening world of human emotion and politics to the more orderly, comforting world of her plants. Separated from her husband Pascal, a heart surgeon, Grace is pursued by her two oldest friends - Ralph, an attractive, disillusioned attorney and sometime rancher, and Rita, a dashing lesbian political activist who has inherited a family mortuary business.

On the surface an engrossing mystery of the contemporary West, The Measurable World is also a book of fascinating interiors, provocative and lyrical, at once exquisitely erotic and lushly poetic.