A book betwixt a curious borderland made by literary fiction and mathematical obsession.

The novel follows a young narrator attempting to understand the strange life of his reclusive uncle, a once-promising mathematician who devoted decades to solving one of the great unsolved problems of number theory: Goldbach’s conjecture.

Mathematics becomes a stage on which ambition, failure, pride, and solitude play out. Historical figures from twentieth-century mathematics drift through the narrative—Hardy, Ramanujan, Gödel—lending the story a quiet documentary texture.

The book is often recommended to mathematicians, but its real subject is the cost of a life organised around a single idea. It is about brilliance, but more precisely about the long shadow cast by the pursuit of it.

This is an uncorrected proof of the first edition of this novel.