Alice is a British physicist on her way to a research job at The Institute for Advanced Studies, New Jersey. Travelling across the Atlantic on board the QE2 she meets Jove, short for Giovanni, one of the most respected quantum physicists in the world and a confirmed lothario. Their affair quickly becomes complicated when Alice falls for Jove's wife, Stella.
Alongside this love triangle are the stories of previous generations. Stella's parents - one German, one Jewish - who fled Nazi Germany together. Alice's parents - her father a working class boy made good from the dockyards of Liverpool, her mother, an Irish beauty - and Alice's grandmother; Bible-fearing, tough, still going out to work in her nineties, a kind of mythological creature, a worker of small miracles.
A celebration of the human heart in all its frailty, confusion and excess, Gut Symmetries, explores parallel lives, loves and universes.