When We Cease to Understand the World

As its five discrete parts tell the stories of some of the key scientific questions and discoveries of that century, they show us unforeseen connections and undo what we thought we already know. From Hermann Göring to a specific colour blue, from the Spanish Civil War to revolutions in mathematical thinking, Labatut shows how these lead us to the central questions of the century.

If the stories told in When We Cease to Understand The World lead to the edge of an abyss of uncertainty, their mode of telling suggests another way of seeing that edge. As Labatut has said, his book walks ‘the thin line between fact and fiction’ and its implicit answer to this uncertainty is not more knowledge, but more fiction.

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A monstrous and brilliant book.

Philip Pullman

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William Boyd

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