The Solitude of Prime Numbers
The beautiful and moving bestseller, an award-winning novel of friendship and tragedy
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
THE AWARD-WINNING, MILLION-COPY BESTSELLER
Discover the heartbreakingly beautiful novel about the intertwined destinies of two friends brought together by childhood tragedy.
'Surprising, intimate and deeply moving’ John Boyne, bestselling author of The Heart’s Invisible Furies
‘Mesmerising’ Good Housekeeping
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?
Praise for The Solitude of Prime Numbers:
‘Clear, heartbreakingly precise prose, the youngest ever winner of the prestigious Premio Strega (the Italian Man Booker)... a stunning achievement’ Daily Mail
‘Very accomplished... melancholic, but strangely beautiful’ Guardian
‘This astute, aching contemplation of solitude has a power to make us all feel a little less alone. A love story told with astonishing perceptiveness and remarkable subtlety’ Stefan Merrill Block, author of The Story of Forgetting
‘Incredibly poetic and powerful exploring complex relationships, friendship and trauma’ 5-star reader review
‘Will break your heart’ 5-star reader review
‘[My] new favourite’ 5-star reader review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Italian author and mathematician Giordano follows two scarred people whose lives intersect but can't seem to join in his cerebral yet touching debut. Alice and Mattia, both survivors of childhood traumas, are the odd ones out amid the adolescent masses in their high school. Mattia has never recovered from the loss of his sister, while Alice still suffers the effects of a skiing accident that damaged her physically and stunted her ability to trust. Now teenagers, Mattia, also addicted to self-injury, has withdrawn into a world of numbers and math, and Alice gains control through starving herself and photography. When they meet, they recognize something primal in each other, but timing and awkwardness keep their friendship on tenuous ground until, years later, their lives come together one last time. Giordano uses Mattia and Alice's trajectory to ask whether there are some people the prime numbers among us who are destined to be alone, or whether two primes can come together. The novel's bleak subject matter is rendered almost beautiful by Giordano's spare, intense focus on his two characters.
