When We Cease to Understand the World

Pushkin Press, July 2021. Trade Paperback. Very Good+. Note from prior owner penciled to second page; text clean. Spine straight, tight and uncreased. Covers clean. Not from a library. 189 pages. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schr鐰inger: these are among the luminaries into whose troubled minds we are thrust as they grapple with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, they alienate friends and lovers, they descend into isolated states of madness. Some of their discoveries revolutionise our world for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear. With breakneck pace and wondrous detail, Benjam璯 Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to break open the stories of scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible. Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.