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  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409082385
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 384

The Solitude of Prime Numbers



A stunning début novel about the intertwined destinies of two friends brought together by childhood tragedy.

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?

  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409082385
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 384

About the author

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.

Also by Paolo Giordano

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Praise for The Solitude of Prime Numbers

A beautiful and affecting account of the ways in which seemingly inconsequential decisions reverberate so intensely as to change a life forever... This is a book about communication... an intimate psychological portrait of two 'prime numbers' - together alone and alone together. A beautiful and affecting account of the ways in which seemingly inconsequential decisions reverberate so intensely as to change a life forever... This is a book about communication... an intimate psychological portrait of two 'prime numbers' - together alone and alone together

Booklist

A gently moving and insightful read

Daily Express

A very accomplished book... A melancholic, but strangely beautiful, read. Shaun Whiteside's translation is exemplary and the acute descriptions of teenage competitiveness, angst and aspiration bring to mind Alan Warner's writing

Guardian

An elegant fable...its recurring themes of loneliness and longing shimmer through trim and supple prose

Prospect Magazine

Cerebral yet touching debut... The novel's bleak subject matter is rendered almost beautiful by Giordano's spare, intense focus on his two characters

Publishers Weekly

Genius... everybody can find in Giordano's book a small piece of himself

Il Giornale

In clear, heartbreakingly precise prose, the youngest ever winner of the prestigious Premio Strega (the Italian Man Booker) explores how trauma and guilt can capsize emotional stability and leave the vulnerable in a wash of unease and loss...a stunning achievement

Daily Mail

Moving... masterful... elegantly discreet

The Times Literary Supplement

The story is mesmerising

Good Housekeeping

The year's most important début

La Repubblica