The Solitude of Prime Numbers - Tapa dura

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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 a 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.

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He had learned his lesson. Choices are made in a few seconds and paid for in the time that remains...

A prime number is a lonely thing: it can only be divided by itself, or by one; it never truly fits with another. Alice and Mattia are also alone, each haunted by childhood trauma. Alice bears the scars of a terrible skiing accident that nearly killed her, and Mattia lives with a guilty secret that lies at the heart of his disabled twin sister's disappearance. When they meet as teenagers, they each recognize in the other a kindred, damaged spirit.

As they grow into adulthood their destinies seem irrevocably intertwined: they are divisible only by themselves and each other. But when the gifted Mattia wins a mathematics posting that takes him thousands of miles away, it seems that love, or its loss, might just be a game of numbers after all; until a chance sighting by Alice of a woman who could be Mattia's sister forces a lifetime of hidden emotion to the surface.

A stunning meditation on aloneness, love and the weight of childhood experience, The Solitude of Prime Numbers asks, can we ever be whole when we're in love with another? And how much of ourselves do we give away? A sensation in its native Italy, where it has sold over a million copies, it is a remarkable début from the youngest ever winner of Italy's prestigious Premio Strega award.