THE AMBASSADOR takes place in Europe a hundred years from now. It is a time when the European Union is the supreme leader of the free world, the main challenger to China, with the USA trailing behind. Scientific advance has brought the ability to beat disease and ageing - not by medicine alone but more fundamentally, by gene therapy. In THE AMBASSADOR, Bill Strether is sent by the American President to the UK to represent his country which, captured by fundamentalists, has banned the medical advances taken for granted in his new home. Although he harbours doubts about its ethics, he finds the official genetic programme breathtaking and impossible to condemn. THE AMBASSADOR is an extraordinarily persuasive account of how the world could be, and the challenges of cloning human beings. The novel argues that human nature won't change, though much else about us will. Scientific discovery is both Pandora's box and Ali Baba's cave. People seldom wish to return to a less comfortable age. When faced with the array of choices offered to us by genetic knowledge, how do we choose?