A young philosopher, fascinated by Heisenberg and his uncertainty principle, grapples with a world scarred by the legacies of war

Beguiled by the figure of German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who, with his notorious uncertainty principle disrupted the assumptions behind quantum mechanics, earning him the Nobel Prize in physics in 1932, a young, disenchanted philosopher attempts to right his own intellectual and emotional course, and take the measure of the evil at work in the contemporary world.
In this critically acclaimed novel, Jérôme Ferrari takes stock of the failings of civilization during the 20th century and inserts their implications into a compelling vision of the contemporary world. His story is one of eternal returns, of a perpetual fall of Icarus - the inevitably compromised meeting between a man’s soul and the mysterious beauty of the world.

Jérôme Ferrari
Jérôme Ferrari is a writer and translator born in 1968 in Paris. His 2012 novel, The Sermon on the Fall of Rome won the Prix Goncourt. He is also the author of Where I Left My Soul (MacLehose, 2012).

• May 10 2017
  Nota Bene
  — World Literature Today
• Apr 19 2017
  Science and the wolf
  — Public Books
• Nov 24 2016
  The Principle
  — Kirkus