The Principle

“A novelist whose concern with how we should live and what we can believe puts him in the tradition of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus” (The Scotsman).

Overpopulation, nuclear war, fascism, contemporary capitalism, and climate crisis all play roles in this epistolary novel in which a young philosopher grapples with the life of Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel Prize–winning German physicist.

As he examines the dark historical events of the early twentieth century alongside the luminous elegance of Heisenberg’s theoretical work, the narrator provides an intimate account of his own youthful struggles and desperate attempts to make sense of a fractured, globalized world. How could a man with such a beautiful mind have participated in such atrocities? Jérôme Ferrari offers a compelling, unflinching vision of the failings of European culture, a hypnotic glimpse into the mysteries of the physical world, and a deeply personal historical interrogation.