Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Benjamin Labatut is a Chilean author born in the Netherlands in 1980. He was raised in The Hague before settling in Chile, where he lives and works. His book When We Cease to Understand the World has been translated into over thirty languages: it was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, selected for Barack Obama's Summer Reading List and named a Guardian, New York Times and New Statesman Book of the Year. The MANIAC is Labatut's first book written in English. Labatut lives with his family in Santiago, Chile.Brilliantly cerebral... magnificent
Sunday Telegraph (five stars)
[Labatut] is fast emerging as the most significant South American writer since Borges... There is no one writing like him anywhere in the world
Telegraph
Absorbing... The MANIAC reads like physicist Carlo Rovelli crossed with the cosmic horror of HP Lovecraft
- Chris Power, Sunday Times
Imaginatively told through the fictionalised personal testimony of von Neumann's friends and family, the novel is as engrossing as it is disturbing'
Financial Times, Books of the Year
Intoxicating... this marvel of a book, which inspires awe and dread in equal measure, is stalked by the greatest terrors of the 20th century, yet its final heart-stopping sentence makes clear the greatest terrors are yet to come
Daily Mail
Darkly intelligent and feverishly propulsive
Observer
Talent, ambition, skill, intelligence - [are] present in abundance
Guardian, Book of the Day
Virtuosic... Labatut is that vanishingly uncommon thing: a contemporary writer of thrilling originality... The MANIAC is a work of dark, eerie and singular beauty
Washington Post
A brooding, heady narrative that is addictively interesting... gripping, provocative
Wall Street Journal
A dark, strange novel by a rising literary star
New Scientist
Captivating
Irish Times
Monstrously good... Reads like a dark foundation myth about modern technology but told with the pace of a thriller
- Mark Haddon,
In fictionalising the history of the atomic bomb, Labatut has landed on a chilling way to dramatise our contemporary fears. Science Fiction-tinged nightmares about new nuclear threats and an alien, self-learning system of intelligence are made both more real and understandable through the voices of the people who gave birth to them
Literary Review
Thrilling - and chilling... A gripping read
Marie Claire, Best Books of 2023
A necessary book, a harrowing one, and it will change the way you look at the world around you
LitHub
As addictive as a true crime tale
Mail on Sunday
Both entertains and provokes... His infernal vision of science captures something of the unsettling vertigo of living right here in the Anthropocene after all
TLS
Labatut's voice comes from the future, to free us from the curse of our present
- Wolfram Eilenberger, author of 'Time of the Magicians',
The MANIAC works as a novel primarily due to Benjamin Labatut's mastery of prose
Irish Business Post
Labatut is very good on making science exciting... less through their technical details than by expressing the human experience of ignorance being swept away, with wonder put in its place
The Critic
If you've yet to sample Labatut, stop wasting time. Get on the Labatut train
BookMunch
Erudite, entertaining and important
Morning Star