When We Cease To Understand The World

Benjamín Labatut’s extraordinary imagination digs deep into the territory between fact and fiction, progress and destruction, genius and madness. Translated by Adrian Nathan West.

Albert Einstein opens a letter sent to him from the Eastern Front during the First World War. Inside, he finds the first exact solution to the equations of general relativity. The genius mathematician Alexander Grothendieck tries to cut all ties with the world, terrified of the horror his discoveries might cause……The mesmerising When We Cease to Understand the World uses a blend of fiction and historical fact to explore the stories of the great minds who expanded our notions of the possible.

‘A Sebaldian book of grippingly narrated stories on science and scientists that cumulatively become a meditation on the history of human destruction.  “How did we get here?” it asks, and answers in utterly original and unexpected ways.’   -  Booker Prize Judges

Benjamín Labatut was born in Rotterdam, Netherlands. He spent his childhood in The Hague and Buenos Aires and when he was twelve years old he moved to Santiago de Chile, where he lives today.