A bestseller in Italy this book won the Italian equivalent of the Man Booker Prize and it is easy to see why. Beautiful prose and a haunting story about loss, love, growing up and finding yourself, make for a mesmerising story that will stay with you long after you have finished the last page.

Synopsis

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?

Reviews

'The year's most important debut La Repubblica Genius...everybody can find in Giordano's book a small piece of himself Il Giornale Moving...masterful...elegantly discreet' Times Literary Supplement

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

'The story is mesmerising' Good Housekeeping

'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

About the Author

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. More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation