The Solitude of Prime Numbers

byPaolo Giordano, Shaun Whiteside (Translator)

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A prime number is inherently a solitary thing: it can only be divided by itself, or by one; it never truly fits with another. Alice and Mattia also move on their own axes, alone with their personal tragedies. As a child Alice's overbearing father drove her first to a terrible skiing accident, and then to anorexia. When she meets Mattia she recognises a kindred spirit, and Mattia reveals to Alice his terrible secret: that as a boy he abandoned his mentally-disabled twin sister in a park to go to a party, and when he returned, she was nowhere to be found.

These two irreversible episodes mark Alice and Mattia's lives for ever, and as they grow into adulthood their destinies seem irrevocably intertwined. But then a chance sighting of a woman who could be Mattia's sister forces a lifetime of secret emotion to the surface.

A meditation on loneliness and love, The Solitude of Prime Numbers asks, can we ever truly be whole when we're in love with another?

Surprising, intimate and deeply moving, The Solitude of Prime Numbers takes the readers on a hypnotic journey through an unexpected love affair. Paolo Giordano writes with grace and elegance of gentle but damaged characters, using inventive language to create a story unlike anything in recent fiction. This is everything a debut novel should be and leaves one longing for the books that will follow.

John Boyne, author of The Heart's Invisible Furies

About Paolo Giordano

Paolo Giordano was born in Turin in 1982. He is working on a doctorate in particle physics.

The Solitude of Prime Numbers, his first novel, has sold over 3 million copies in its native Italian, and is being translated into twenty languages. It won Italy's answer to the Man Booker Prize, the Premio Strega Award.
Details
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • ISBN: 9781409082385
  • Length: 384 pages
  • Price: £4.99
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