Benjamín Labatut

‘A monstrous and brilliant book’ Philip Pullman ‘Wholly mesmerising and revelatory... Completely fascinating’ William Boyd Sometimes discovery brings destruction When We Cease to Understand the World shows us great minds striking out into dangerous, uncharted terrain. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger: these are among the luminaries into whose troubled lives 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, Benjamín 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 2021 International Booker Prize

When We Cease to Understand the World

Noreen Farsai

Stephen Schenkenberg

This point really helped me to grasp that sometimes, even the most intellectual of individuals find things that are accurate and factual but don't hold any relevance in our lives whatsoever.

Jordan Parker

physics is rife with infinities that are nothing more than numbers on paper, abstractions that do not represent real-world objects

Syrina

In a medical examination on the eve of the Nuremberg Trials, the doctors found the nails of Hermann Göring's fingers and toes stained a furious red, the consequence of his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic of which he took more than one hundred pills a day. William Burroughs described it as similar to heroin, twice as strong as codeine, but with a wired coke-like edge.

 The liquid form of then poison, known in Germany as Blausäure or blue acid, is highly volatile: it boils at twenty-six degrees Celsius and gives off a slight aroma of almonds, which not everyone can distinguish as doing so requires a gene absent in forty per cent of humanity.

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