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A Game with Sharpened Knives
On sale
4th May 2006
Price: £9.99
Selected:
Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780753818015
‘This is a text you will remember for years…austere, authoritative fiction, a fine and melancholy novel, its poignant insights shimmering’ Hilary Mantel, Literary Review
‘Neil Belton’s first novel is an improbable masterpiece. It is improbable because it requires the reader to imagine what it is like to be a scientific genius. It is a masterpiece because he pulls it off’ EVENING STANDARD
The reviews have been simply stunning for this debut novel set in Ireland in 1941. Nobel prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrodinger was forced to flee Austria in 1933 after the Nazis invaded but was saved from disgrace and danger when the revolutionary Irish leader, Eamon de Valera, invited him to Ireland. The novel is set against the background of a country not truly at peace, either with Germany, or with its neighbour across the Irish Sea. Erwin Schrodinger, cosmopolitan intellectual and emotional enigma, is living in cramped exile on the outskirts of Dublin, with his wife, his lover, and their child. But in the pervading atmosphere of fear and distrust, Schrodinger lives a precarious existence, haunted by his past and by mysterious threats in the present.
‘Neil Belton’s first novel is an improbable masterpiece. It is improbable because it requires the reader to imagine what it is like to be a scientific genius. It is a masterpiece because he pulls it off’ EVENING STANDARD
The reviews have been simply stunning for this debut novel set in Ireland in 1941. Nobel prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrodinger was forced to flee Austria in 1933 after the Nazis invaded but was saved from disgrace and danger when the revolutionary Irish leader, Eamon de Valera, invited him to Ireland. The novel is set against the background of a country not truly at peace, either with Germany, or with its neighbour across the Irish Sea. Erwin Schrodinger, cosmopolitan intellectual and emotional enigma, is living in cramped exile on the outskirts of Dublin, with his wife, his lover, and their child. But in the pervading atmosphere of fear and distrust, Schrodinger lives a precarious existence, haunted by his past and by mysterious threats in the present.
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Reviews
Readers for whom the name Erwin Schrodinger conjures up only a vague image of a cat will find this absorbing novel, based on his wartime years in Dublin, a revelation.
This is a novel of many layers, all of them startlingly evocative. It's about war, science, love - or the lack of it - big ideas and small kindness. It's breathtaking.
A surprisingly insightful novel, beautifully written
This book is a brilliantly executed exercise in mood, which conveys the vulnerability, confusion and even the surreality of Schrodinger's refugee existence
An atmospheric psychodrama... This evocative novel is distinguished by an undercurrent of gnawing doubt, and potent images abound.