> Skip to content
  • Published: 1 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409079064
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

The Invention of Everything Else




The Invention of Everything Else is a tremendously powerful and moving exploration of human loneliness and isolation, and the opposing powers of emotional and scientific imagination.

Louisa is an imaginative and curious chambermaid who, while cleaning rooms at the New Yorker Hotel, stumbles across a man living permanently in room 3327, which he has transformed into a scientific laboratory. Brought together by a shared interest in the pigeons that nest in the hotel, Louisa discovers that the mysterious guest is Nikola Tesla, one of the most brilliant - and most neglected - inventors of the twentieth century.

The Invention of Everything Else charts the relationship of the girl and the genius during the last week of Tesla's life, when sinister forces are closing in on him. As well as being an engaging literary mystery, this exceptional novel movingly tells the life story of this extraordinary man and also recounts the heartbreak and redemption of one ordinary family...

  • Published: 1 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409079064
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

About the author

Samantha Hunt

Samantha Hunt's fiction has been published in the New Yorker and McSweeney's and she has written one previous novel. She received the '5 under 35' award from the American National Book Foundation in 2006 and currently teaches writing and bookmaking at the Pratt Institute.

Praise for The Invention of Everything Else

A beguiling mix of love, death, pigeons and time travel, it's a gem of a story about the power of imagination...An ingenious work of historical fiction

Marie Claire

A brilliant evocation of the life of the inventor Nikola Tesla

Guardian

A fantastical story that engages the heart and mind, as Hunt pays tribute to the power of invention, and the enduring strength of love

Psychologies

a fascinating blend of fact, fiction, history and dare I say, science fiction surrounding the weird and wonderful life of Nikola Tesla the acknowledged father of radio and AC electricity.

Dovegreyreader

A sophisticated pastiche of science fiction, fantasy, melodrama, and historical anecdote....It all adds up to a precocious math of human marvel

Elle

An ambitious conflation of fact and fiction

Literary Review

Both intelligent and compassionate... admirably ambitious... beautifully conjured

Daily Telegraph

Completely original, one of the most distinctive and unforgettable voices I've read in years

Dave Eggers

Dazzling

Vanity Fair

her portrait of Tesla buzzes with vitality

Metro

Hunt has done a fine job of reanimating the dead and reawakening my curiosity about this odd, overlooked man... Hunt's prose is sylish and tasty and her observations wise and witty

Scotsman

Hunt presents a convincing portrayal of youthful confusion... [Her] gray, Chekhovian moments mark Hunt as a writer to watch

Time Out New York

Hunt's deft blend of sf elements and romantic subplots may remind readers of Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, while her prose style and attention to historical detail are on a par with Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Hunt's greatest triumph, however, lies in her depiction of Tesla, who wavers between genius and madness with carefully controlled charm.

Library Journal

Remarkable... Hunt wears her historical and scientific learning lightly

Financial Times

Remarkable...Hunt wears her historical and scientific learning lightly

Financial Times

Samantha Hunt is an exciting find - a fresh, original voice... a fantastical love story... literary gold... It should appeal to fans of The Time Traveller's Wife and Donna Tartt

Sunday Express

Samantha Hunt's fantasy comes closer than any biography to solving the riddle of Tesla's commercial and personal failings ... The Invention of Everything Else is perfect for nights spent in the wrong hotel, once your travel plans have, as usual, gone subtly awry

New Scientist

Samantha Hunt's fantasy comes closer than any biography to solving the riddle of Tesla's commercial and personal failings... The Invention of Everything Else is perfect for nights spent in the wrong hotel, once your travel plans have, as usual, gone subtly awry

New Scientist

Samantha Hunt's writing is free of affectation and carries surprising conviction

The New Yorker

This unusual novel skilfully interweaves the story of the eccentric inventor of radio and AC electricity with that of Louisa ... a compelling novel.

Emma Lee-Potter, Express

Weird and wonderful debut novel

Red