Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29401 in Books
• Published on: 2009-08-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Review
An intriguing thriller set on the boundaries between madness and genius, that lost domain where few scientists go. A foray into a little known facet of the greatest mind of the 20th century, The Einstein Girl is all the better for not being quite what you might expect.
--João Magueijo, Professor in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College, London, and author of Faster than the Speed of Light

`intriguing novel... atmospheric thriller.' --The Irish Independent

`A first-rate historical thriller...Sington's grasp of period detail is awesome...This is a serious novel with plenty to say
--The Guardian

Review
'A dark and beautiful novel, a fascinating historical thriller, and a tender love story.' - Rebecca Stott, author of New York Times bestselling Ghostwalk

About the Author
Philip Sington was born in Cambridge. His father was was an industrial chemist and his mother an officer in British Intelligence. After studying History at Trinity College, Cambridge he worked as a business journalist and magazine editor for nine years. He co-authored six novels under the joint pseudonym Patrick Lynch, selling well over a million copies worldwide. His first solo novel, Zoia's Gold, was published in 2005. To date his work has been translated into eighteen foreign languages. He lives in London with his family. www.philipsington.com

Customer Reviews

Excellent and surprising historical novel
Atmospheric and elegantly written historical novel that winds its way through the shadows of Einstein's blinding genius. Set in Berlin in the months before the Nazis take power, it follows the journey of a war-scarred psychiatrist as he tries to uncover the identity and past of a celebrated female patient, known by the press as `The Einstein Girl'. Sington's grip on the period is extraordinary, and his writing is a pleasure in itself. Though billed as a thriller, it has much more in common with Sebastian Faulks or Pat Barker than it does with Robert Harris or Philip Kerr. So if it's explosions, psychopaths and a high body count you're after, look elsewhere. On the other hand, this book has more than its share of twists and unfolds in a way you certainly won't expect.

Worth persevering
It took a while to get into this book but it was worth persevering with as I enjoyed it in the end.

There is a 'flash-forward' scene at the beginning which confused me and then a hospital scene which I found a little too graphic, but I persevered and found the book became clearer as to sequence of events and more enjoyable.

The main character, a psychiatrist, soon engaged my sympathy. The action is set in Berlin in the early 1930s and the political developments are seen through his eyes. They are not referred to very much and when they are they tend to be relevant to the plot, rather than to show how much the author has researched the period.

There are some references to Einstein's work which I found hard going and I tended to skim over them but this proved not to matter.

Too Many Threads
I am left with the feeling that not all the dots were joined up. Our hero, who is now a psychiatrist is riddled with syphilis, which he contracted during his service as a war surgeon. He is haunted by the memory of his brother, who was fascinated by the new quantum mechanics, but who was killed in the war. The girl was more like a figment of the imagination, and I am uncomfortable with the slur on Einstein in a work of fiction. Our hero's colleague tries to cash in on the publicity by injecting dangerous substances into the girl. Somehow, the predicted dire consequences of such treatment do not quite materialise, and we have to leave it there and go meet Einstein's first wife and family, who are shown as dysfunctional. We move to Eastern Europe now and another thread begins with a case of child abuse...
About the only point of interest for me was the well-portrayed creeping menace of Nazism in the run-up to the second world war.