Beguiled by the figure of German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who disrupted the assumptions of quantum mechanics with his notorious Uncertainty Principle, earning him the Nobel Prize in physics in 1932, a young, disenchanted philosopher attempts to right his own intellectual and emotional course and take the measure of the evil at work in the contemporary world.

In this critically acclaimed novel, Jérôme Ferrari takes stock of European culture's failings during the 20th century and inserts their implications into a compelling vision of the contemporary world. His story is one of eternal returns, of a perpetual fall of Icarus—the inevitably compromised meeting between a man's soul and the mysterious beauty of the world.

Jérôme Ferrari
Born in Paris in 1968, Jérôme Ferrari is an author and translator who has taught in Algeria, Corsica, and Abu Dhabi. His 2012 novel, The Sermon on the Fall of Rome (MacLehose, 2016), won the Goncourt Prize. He is also the author of Where I Left My Soul (MacLehose, 2012), and The Principle (Europa, 2017).

• Apr 19 2017
  Science and the Wolf
  — Public Books
• Feb 15 2017
  #RivetingReviews
  — European Literature Network
• Nov 24 2016
  “An elegant, cheerless meditation on how even the brightest people can find it in themselves to accommodate evil on the way to annihilation.”
  — Kirkus Reviews