FROM the moment pharmacologist Marina Singh learns of her colleague’s mysterious death in the Amazon rainforest, novelist Ann Patchett has you in her grip. In her latest book, State of Wonder, Patchett introduces a tribe hidden in the jungle whose women give birth into their late 70s, a drug company’s quest to package that fertility in a pill and, hunkered down in the Amazon, a brilliant but cantankerous researcher.
In a tale of adventure that can be forgiven for the occasionally too-neat plot device, the novel follows Singh from her sterile office in Minnesota to the jungle lab of her…
