Author(s): Philip Sington

Fiction

Thirty years after his death, private correspondence between Albert Einstein and his first wife, the Serbian mathematician Mileva Maric, was opened to public scrutiny for the first time. It revealed glimpses of a tragedy at the heart of their troubled marriage: a secret they went to extraordinary lengths to keep hidden from the world, and which, in spite of their divorce, they carried to the grave. Two months before Adolf Hitler's rise to power, a beautiful young woman is found half naked and near death in the woods outside Berlin. When she finally emerges from a coma, she can remember nothing, not even her own name. The only clue to her identity is a handbill found nearby, advertising a public lecture by Albert Einstein: 'On the Present State of Quantum Theory'. Psychiatrist Martin Kirsch little knows that this will be his last case. Searching for the truth about his celebrated patient, he finds professional fascination turning to love. His investigations lead him to a remote corner of Serbia via a psychiatric hospital in Zurich, where the inheritor of Einstein's genius - his youngest son, Eduard - is writing a book that will destroy his illustrious father and, in the process, change the world. Intricately researched and relentlessly compelling, "The Einstein Girl" is a mystery about love and the lust for knowledge; a dark journey into the psychological hinterland of the twentieth century's greatest mind, culminating in an astonishing quantum twist.