Matters of Choice

With Choices, Noah Gordon brings to a close his great trilogy spanning the generations of the Cole medical dynasty. Beginning with the legendary 11th-century doctor Robert J. Cole, each eldest son has borne the same name and middle initial, and some have possessed the uncanny "sixth sense" known as The Gift: the terrible and instinctive knowledge that someone is about to die. In Choices, it emerges again in the present, but this time in a daughter, Roberta Jeanne d'Arc Cole, known as R.J. The first time R.J. defies her beloved father is when she is born a female; the second, when she chooses to study law rather than medicine. Yet destiny is to overtake her when R.J. realizes that she has inherited The Gift. As she holds the hands of a sick man, R.J. feels a dreadful certainty that he is going to die; tragically, he is her own lover. Struggling with her grief, R.J. knows she must bow to the inevitable and become a physician. But her life changes when she moves to a small-town practice and is faced with a terrible dilemma -- and an important choice to make.