From the author of the highly acclaimed The Falling Sky, an outstanding collection of short stories on the theme of science and its impact on all our lives In stories by turns witty, accessible, fascinating, and deeply moving, Pippa Goldschmidt demonstrates her mastery of the short form as well as her ability to draw out scientific themes with humane and compelling insight. This collection allows readers to spy on Bertolt Brecht as he rewrites his play Life of Galileo with Charles Laughton after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It introduces Albert Einstein as he deals with the loss of his first child, Liesel. We meet Robert Oppenheimer scheming against his tutor, Professor Patrick Blackett, at Cambridge University, having fallen in love with Blackett’s wife. We also hear the story of a female university student starting a love affair with her lecturer paralleled alongside the "relationship" between Alice and Bob, two imaginary figures that symbolize the theory of relativity. These stories' scopes can be epic, at other times intimate, providing a forensic examination of relationships and the forces that influence them.