Philip Ball | Granta

Philip Ball

Philip Ball has written several award-winning works of non-fiction, including Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, Bright Earth: Art & the Invention of Colour, H2O: a Biography of Water, The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science, and most recently The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It. This is his first novel. He is a consultant editor at Nature and a contributing editor at Prospect.


The Sun And Moon Corrupted

Philip Ball

What if you had developed a machine that generated energy for free and no one believed you? That is the lot of Kurt Neder, once Einstein’s accomplice and the brightest young physicist of his generation, now a lost soul wandering Europe in the hope that someone will pay him heed. Enter Lena – an intrepid young British journalist, hoping for a story to kick-start her stalled career, and driven by her own needs and beliefs, and her own need to believe. Her trail takes her from the cafes of Vienna via the castles of Transylvania and the labs of Princeton to the blasted borderlands of the old Soviet Union, in the search for truth and coherence, both scientific and personal. Here is a Geiger counter of a novel that crackles with ideas and offers the reader insights and emotions not often found in fiction.