What would happen if you gave Isaac Newton a particle accelerator?
"...moves fast and brims with humor and wonder." - Wesley Morris, Critic at Large, The New York Times

With ten years passing for every three minutes on a remote stretch of Texas coast, planes fall out of the sky, evolved species are on the hunt, and people die inside one of the most vicious ecosystems ever grown - all as a result of Isaac's misguided efforts to slow down time. This isn't the Isaac Newton that you know - the one who sat under the apple tree, wrote Principia, and died in 1726. This is his genetic clone. Though they share the same exact DNA, this Isaac Newton was born in 2002. He grew up eating cheeseburgers and playing Pokémon.

Imagine if someone told you-on the final day of high school-that you had the same body, cell for cell, neuron for neuron, as Martin Luther King, Charles Darwin, or Nicolai Tesla? How would you live up to that? For most of us, it would make us feel like a failure at the starting line.

Alastair Albert Mayes certainly does, especially with a high-functioning Isaac Newton spinning out modern discoveries at a dizzying pace. Alastair has no interest in living up to the legacy of his twin- in-time Albert Einstein. Already burned out from the expectations of his teachers, he rejects the call, unwilling to join his classmates in the 'free internship' offered by the mysterious Cornerstone corporation funding his high school.

He was not the only one. What had started as a dark Cold War secret grew into a corporate effort to recover and resurrect the DNA of the greatest thinkers, artists, and scientists from history. 18 years later, mankind's most daring fantasies have come true. Leonardo Da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and other greats of our species were reborn, their genetic code primed to express itself in a new, more dangerous modern world. Now teenagers in a high-pressure high school, the students are unaware of their genetic legacy until their graduation is suddenly moved up.

Like most graduating seniors, even the illusion of choice can be debilitating. And when the out-of-control Pentagon project, led by Isaac's misplaced hubris, starts compressing years into minutes, Alastair's hand is forced. It is up to him and his tight-knit group of friends - history's intellectual misfits - to discover the great talents hidden inside their DNA before it is too late.

With the grounded yet massive world-building of READY PLAYER ONE, thrilling scientific questions of JURRASIC PARK, the time-bending teen drama of BEFORE I FALL, and the nods to history and clones of AVALON HIGH, Wachter's THE TWIN PARADOX is a brilliantly plotted tale that is both intimate and massive, relentless yet deliberate, and explores the themes of self-acceptance, self-confidence, and natural selection in a richly hued and unforgettable new world. Ultimately the eternal question of Nature versus Nurture is boiled down into this fast-paced thriller told over the course of five days and culminates in one single question:

Do we get to choose who we are?

"The Twin Paradox is one of the best science thrillers to come along since Andy Weir's The Martian." Chris Weitz, Screenwriter, Rogue One